Makamisa - Phantasm of Revenge

Khavn De La Cruz / Philippines, Germany / 2024 / Czech Premiere / 73 min.

synopsis

The novel Makamisa (1890) by the Filipino poet and revolutionary José Rizal was never completed. In it, the author denounced religious hypocrisy and the abuse of power by Christian colonisers. When a fragment of the novel was discovered nearly a century later, it became the inspiration for this iconoclastic film poem. A series of scenes captured on hand-coloured and variously distorted 35mm film stock takes us back to the early days of cinema, when the Philippines was simultaneously fighting for its independence. The radical anti-colonialist pamphlet is accompanied by a soundtrack by David Toop and the director's band, The Kontra-Kino Orchestra.

“Everything you see on the screen has no post-production, we turned the bathroom into a darkroom where we manipulated the film.”

Quote source: Il manifesto

biography

Khavn De La Cruz (1973) is a prominent figure in the Philippine artistic avant-garde, a singer, poet, pianist, and the author of dozens of feature and short films screened at leading festivals. He himself has been a member of festival juries in Clermont-Ferrand, Copenhagen and Jihlava. He is the founder and director of the first digital film festival in the Philippines .MOV.