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Manila in the Fangs of Darkness

BAFICI 2009
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Info
Year:

2008
Original Title:

Manila in the Fangs of Darkness
País:

Filipinas 
Director:

Khavn De la Cruz

Color:

Color
Format:

Video: Digibeta
Duration:

min
Cast:
  • Bembol Roco, Ella Cortez, Brian Ong
Production:
  • GUIÓN: Carljoe Javier, Khavn
  • FOTOGRAFÍA: Albert Benzon
  • MONTAJE: Lawrence Ang

Synopsis

Very likely the world's most prolific major filmmaker, Khavn makes "filmless films" (his company's name and his way of defining video-shot cinema) with a madcap energy married to deadly seriousness, tethered to no genre or tradition except his own commitment to radical cinema's capacity to change audiences. But like his fellow radicals Raya Martin, Lav Diaz and John Torres, Khavn knows his Filipino film history, and honors his cinema godfather, Lino Brocka, in Manila in the Fangs of Darkness —a title pun on Brocka's classic, Manila in the Claws of Neon, starring the young Bembol Roco as Julio Madiaga, searching for his beloved and endangered Ligaya. The older Roco now reappears as a hybrid character beyond the grave, partly as tragic Julio, partly as brutal Kommander Kontra in Brocka's Fight for Us, still trying to save Ligaya from the city's abyss of sex and violence. Khavn's recent films display Manila as a trap, where the past is perpetually revisited in the present, just as Roco's past films recycle in his mind as he wanders like Travis Bickle and Orpheus down the mean streets.