Wazakest! This is not a Khavn cycle
Six feature films and one concert/performance comprise Wazakest!, an audiovisual cycle introducing us to the work of Filipino filmmaker Khavn.
Although this cycle is only the tip of the colossal, impressive, utterly free-spirited iceberg that is Khavn’s oeuvre, it’s still a radical and extravagant taste of the lavish banquet of his filmography. Considered the father of digital film in the Philippines, Khavn is capable of shooting a feature film in 24 hours and turning out 20 shorts a year: cinema on the edge that energetically pursues the ephemeral. Khavn’s incomparable work surveys Philippine history in his own way, denouncing the moral, cultural and material looting his country has suffered throughout its history with heart-rending irony.
With pop culture as a banner and religion and corruption as a curse, that world is inhabited by the children of Mondomanila and Squatterpunk. A fan of genre movies, he depicts the fate of the Philippines in melodramas like Ruined Heart or Misericordia, and uses fantasy to narrate the forced disappearances under the Marcos dictatorship in Desaparadiso. Moreover, all his films are liberally sprinkled with gore, vampires and zombies, reserving a special place for the musical genre. The films featured in this cycle are occasionally delusional documents of an unpredictable, extreme world, which Khavn represents with overwhelming creative freedom. There are no limits in imagery or sound; not even the screen can limit his audiovisual universe.
It is difficult to establish a complete catalogue of the work of Khavn (Philippines, 1973), but he is estimated to have produced about 50 features and approximately 115 shorts. He has also authored six books, somewhere between poetry and fiction (he claims to write three poems a day), and composed 23 music albums to date. He won the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Award, a prestigious Philippine literary prize, for his poetry and fiction. Khavn’s films have been shown at numerous international festivals, including the Berlinale, IFF Rotterdam, Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival, BiFan and Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival.
