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Khavn De La Cruz, is a prolific Filipino filmmaker, writer, pianist, songwriter and composer. Since 1994 he has directed over 300 films including Squatterpunk (2006), Manila in the Fangs of Darkness (2008) and has collaborated with Alexander Kluge on films such as Orphea (2020) and Happy Lamento (2018), making him one of the most productive filmmakers in the Philippines and beyond. From 2002 to 2011, he was the festival director and programmer for Mov International Film, Music and Literature Festival. He has been a jury member at multiple festivals including the Berlinale and Leipzig Film Festival.

He has exhibited at the MoMA, Maxxi, Guggenheim Museum, Tate Modern, Museo Reina Sofia, National Museum of Singapore, and Venice Architecture Biennale; lectured at the Berlinale Talent Campus, Bela Tarr's Film Factory, Goethe Institute, the Danish Film Institute, and his alma mater, the Ateneo; and curated programmes for the Viennale, the Edinburgh International Film Festival and the Sharjah Biennial. Selected retrospectives of...

Expanding on the homonymous short, “Greaseman” presents the comments of the original much more eloquently while adding more, through a presentation that points towards the music video, since there is no dialogue, but the presence of music is constant. The film was shot in one day and premiered at a pop-up outdoor screening outside the infamous Manila Film Center in 2001.

The film focuses on two radically different individuals. The Greaseman is a dirty bump roaming the streets of Manila with no shoes, barely dressed, trying to scrape anything he can to eat, while reading a book or being followed by children who seem to mock him but not being afraid of his terrible appearance. The Yuppie is a well-off man, living in a comfortable apartment, working in an office and spending his time visiting galleries or flirting with shop clerks. One night, however, the radically differently paths of the two men collide,...

After a number of images that seem either inside water or kaleidoscopic, and an intense song with dual vocals, the frame is split in two, with the left showing a rather pitiful, rag-tag man (the Greaseman) on the streets and the right a well-off one (the Yuppie) in his house. This duality also extends to the rest of the narrative, with the singing/narration in English functioning like the voice of the first man and the narration that is heard almost at the same time in Tagalog, seemingly telling a story, occasionally featuring some biblical (?) references.

The film proceeds with juxtaposing the lives of the two radically different men before another, similar with the initial, sequence, functions as a transition to a scene showing just the Yuppie in his car, driving. Eventually, he sees the first man unconscious on the side of the street. Surprisingly, he stops and carries him to his car and eventually,...

There are at least two disparate movies in Hari ng Tondo (Where I Am King), Carlos Siguion-Reyna's first feature film in more than a decade. The first movie is the one written by Bibeth Orteza, which was followed faithfully by Siguion-Reyna. Orteza is a veteran screenwriter whose most recent works are television sitcoms or sitcom-like crowd drawers like Nobody Nobody but Juan (Eric Quizon, 2009), Si Agimat at si Enteng Kabisote (Tony Y. Reyes, 2010), and My Little Bossings (Marlon Rivera, 2013). Her best scripts, however, are the ones directed by Siguion-Reyna, like Ligaya ang Itawag Mo Sa Akin (Call Me Joy, 1997), Ang Lalaki sa Buhay ni Selya (The Man in Her Life, 1997), and Kahapon, May Dalawang Bata (Yesterday Children, 1999). Her...

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