From a description only Khavn could have written: Three years before Georges Méliès' Le Voyage dans la Lune and ten years before Segundo de Chomón's Excursion en la Luna, indigenous proto-surrealist Philippine filmmaker Narding Salome Exelsio made Nagtungo si Juan Tamad sa Buwan in 1898 while the Philippines were being sold by Spain to America for twenty million dollars (VAT not included).
In this 4 minute short, Khavn plays the titular character as he embarks on a series of absurd “adventures”, while text on screen gives additional info about Juan Taman. What becomes evident from the text is that Khavn considers Juan as a true scumbag, as lines like “the laziest bastard of Spanish priests, adopted by American nuns” eloquently state. This aspect and the overall, silent film frame speed induce the short with a sense of comedy, while the series of surreal vignettes that comprise the narrative are the source of the director's trademark slapstick/chaotic aesthetics.
In that fashion, we watch Juan Tamad swimming, hitting a man who is choking another one with a stick, and a rooster running around, while we also learn that the way for someone to decolonize himself is to remove his cancerous colon, in a comment that could be perceived as an accusation to the colonial powers that dominated Philippines in the past.
The images are dominated by a blue hue that makes it somewhat difficult to discern what is happening, with the same applying to a number of spots that frequently appear on screen, and a couple of sequences presenting frames within frames. At the same time, however, the quality of the image, and thus, the production, is evident, even beneath the aforementioned “tricks”.
Lastly, Khavn is hilarious to watch in all the vignettes, with his eccentricity as expressed by the clothes he wears and the way he moves fitting the general aesthetics of the film to perfection.
As with all the segments of “The Lost Film Trilogy”, (“Filipiniana“, and “Aswang (1933)” the other two), “Juan Tamad Goes To The Moon (1898)” is a funny and playful “what if” on how these lost films could (not) have been, as much as an homage to the silent era of Filipino films.
