Makamisa: Phantasm of Revenge 2024
In this whimsical historical fresco, a counterpoint to today’s urgent political issues, the figure of the Filipino revolutionary Rizal is revisited in the light of early silent films.
In this whimsical historical fresco, a counterpoint to today’s urgent political issues, the figure of the Filipino revolutionary Rizal is revisited in the light of early silent films.
1901, Balangiga. Eight-year-old Kulas flees town with his grandfather and their carabao to escape General Smith's Kill & Burn order. He finds a toddler amid a sea of corpses and together, the two boys struggle to survive the American occupation.
As a typhoon bears down on a sleepy rural town in the Philippines, strange events and even stranger behaviour foreshadow the watery catastrophe to come.
“Double, double, toil and trouble,” indeed! Shakespeare’s punchiest tragedy gets a makeover in a way that only the prodigious Filipino multi-hyphenate Khavn De La Cruz could deliver. Unfolding in the Municipality of Marcos, Ilocos Norte and Khavn’s own Burroughsian Interzone of Mondomanila – also the title of the director’s crazed horror-comedy-crime drama, which premiered at IFFR 2012 – this mash-up of styles, genres, moods and atmospheres features a cast of over 100 performers and defies any easy description, even with so familiar a text. But as Khavn says of his source material, "Usually, word is king. Here, text is just one of the many cogs. It’s a column, a roof shingle, an ornament."
A reinvention of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, set in contemporary Manila as a rock musical.
Kulob is everyone who believes in nothing
The amazing adventures of Gunam-gunam (Rumi) and Guni-guni (Phantasm). Adapted from the book Auxiliary Materials for Teaching the Filipino Language by Kelly Sta. Ana Nicolas (Philippine Normal College, 1964).