41. Love is a Dog from Hell (2021) by Khavn
The juxtaposition of different contextual and cinematic elements continues in the rest of the movie, with Khavn and his DPs, Albert Banzon and Gym Lumbera using 10 different cameras (including Super8) in order to present a cornucopia of different colors, contrasts, hues and definitions, the chaos that is “Love is a Dog From Hell”. Images that look like kaleidoscopic paintings, footage from a documentary (?) about a medical procedure, Orphea sawing and “playing” with a pig's head, the titles appearing in the middle of the movie, a man who speaks in repeated sounds (Vim Nadera from “Ruined Heart”) while the subtitles present his words in a sort of a translation, frantic laughters, a penis peeing, the slums, space sounds combined with spacey images and colors, and animation by Rox Lee all come together in the most artfully twisted way, courtesy of Lawrence S. Ang‘s frantic, absurd, but rather fitting editing.
42. National Anarchist: Lino Brocka (2023)
Lino Brocka is probably the most famous filmmaker of the Philippines internationally, with the inclusion of “Manila in the Claws of Light ” in Martin Scorcese's World Cinema Project helping the most in that regard. Brocka directed over sixty fiction features between 1970 and 1991, the year he died in a car accident. Khavn's “tribute” actually begins with his death, with the intertitles hinting that, considering his continuous criticism of the various governments of the country, this might as well not be an accident. Khavn, who has frequently dealt in various ways with Brocka in his films, took everything that was available from his filmography, including VHS and bad quality YouTube clips, and made a collage in his trademark loud, in-your-face, chaotic, color-grading style, which resulted in “National Anarchist”
43. Nitrate: To the Ghosts of the 75 Lost Philippine Silent Films (1912-1933) (2023)
In that fashion, the movie unfolds as a series of different footage from different movies, presented in different coloring each time, with red, blue, green, purple, and black-and-white dominating the images, and with a different sound approach, which includes various styles of music, narration, even the reciting of poetry. What connects the movies presented, is that all of them seem to be segments of horror titles, with graveyards, fires, ghosts, vampires, Ouija boards, hanged dolls, and knives with Jesus carved on them being the most memorable images in this collection of vignettes.
