Khavn: Manila Guerilla Filmmaker

At LUFF 2012, we discovered Khavn with the screening of “Mondomanila”. A genuine Manila punk film perspiring urgency and resourcefulness. The director often sticks his camera in the heart of Manila slums, in a Guerrilla mode — in other words, hastily, without any official agreement. For the need of documentaries, fiction films or visual experimentations along, Khavn catches the social violence of an alarming everyday life. With his partner and accomplice Achinette Villamor, this multidisciplinary artist (writer, composer, singer…) comes to present a few titles of his impressive filmography. In parallel, he will conduct the Guerilla Punk Film Workshop, whose result — a short film — will be screened as a preamble to the closing night ceremony, on Saturday 20.10.

Khavn also gives a workshop.
Khavn also presents the cinérama Popular Pinoy Pictures

Popular Pinoy Pictures

Through a simplifying lens, one could say that apart from a few sub-Mad Max coproduced by Roger Corman and two or three hybrid flicks starring Weng Weng, the popular cinema of the Philippines — as opposed to arthouse productions — is still little known in our lands. That’s why Khavn offered us a selection of newly restored popular films. From the bizarre drama to the wrecked family fantasy through the incongruous musical, this sample reveals a surprising diversity. In the end, a cinema screening with live music by Kontra-Kino Orchestra, gathering between others Khavn and Brezel Göring (Stereo Total), on the 1953 adaptation of the popular comic book Dyesebel.

Khavn also gives a workshop.
A cinérama is also dedicated to Khavn.

Michael Armstrong: the intangible

While the very respectable British film industry was sinking in an economic crisis at the end of the ‘60s, Michael Armstrong’s career took off in the exploitation cinema’s network of fringe productions. From realistic horror to nostalgic fantasy, through sexy comedy and crime chronicle, he has written, produced, shot and/or performed in many films considered as classics nowadays. This retrospective offers the opportunity to (re)discover film works that defied censorship, offended the ego of producers and gave cold sweat to institutions, in while still featuring future talents or popular stars.

Carte blanche: Extrême Cinéma

Have you ever heard about a Film institute hosting a seedy film festival? This Film institute is in Toulouse, and the festival is called Extrême Cinéma. This big brother of sleazy film festivals will celebrate its 20th edition in February 2019. Vigorously headed by the pitiless Frédéric Thibaut, whose alias Professor Thibaut should petrify some patients escaped from his laboratory. Extrême Cinéma has successfully propagated pretty pictures with a sincere love for the most deviant of them. The absolute proof being four scandalous treasures coming direct from a dungeon in southern France.

The Church of Satan and the 7th art

Too impatient to wait for its 666th edition, LUFF takes an interest this year in the surprising relationship between The Church of Satan founded by Anton LaVey and show business, Hollywood in particular. The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Jayne Mansfield, Kenneth Anger or Forrest J. Ackerman have gravitated around this entity; LaVey was hired as consultant for the shooting of “The Devil’s Rain” while banned from the set of “The Exorcist”. The marriage between the capital city of glamour and Satanist darkness entices you and fascinates you? Then let yourself be guided towards the light by the reverend Steven Johnson Leyba… It’s painless. Almost.

M. Woods and the Numb Spiral

Born in 1988, M.Woods has been chronicling for 13 years the propagation of “The Numb Spiral”, a digital sickness revealing itself through the codification and symbolic negation of the being. In its entirety, this work combines writing, web series, virtual realities, performance, photography, and cinema. With his films, constructed out of footage, both analogue and digital, collected via unnatural processes, his work is being qualified as delirious, satirical, political, transgressive, ludicrous… Upon the release of his first feature, “Dailies from Dumpland”, this proto-punk multimedia prophet has come to clear up the Evil at the heart of the media sphere.

Billy Roisz: Tricky Woman

Billy Roisz performs on stage because she fiddles with sounds. But she also deserves a welcome into darkened rooms as she fiddles with pictures. On which she fiddles again with sounds. As a main figure of Austrian experimental scene, her videos are as minimalist as conceptual. A tad perverse, she plays with visual and/or sound perception to lure the spectator to unexpected places. The result is fascinating, sometimes even petrifying... consider “THE”, a horrific and hair-raising film screened during the 2015 Berlinale and demonstrating a startling mastery of suggestion in the not so indulgent milieu of experimental cinema.

Billy Roisz also gives a performance on Wednesday 17.10 at Salle des Fêtes.

Ultra Rêve

Three short films, out of the ordinary, brought together under a bewitching and enticing title. They are “After School Knife Fight” by the duo Poggi/Viner, “The Islands” by Gonzales, and “Ultra Pulp” by Mandico. Three atmospheres, three sensitivities, going through three forms of expression (music, theatre and cinema) and which, put end-to-end, create an alternative pathway towards borrowed worlds of romance first, then obsession, and in the end, possession. Worlds of soft naivety, of nightmarish creatures and of pop fantasy, reminding us of the mysterious and velvety snatches of our dreams that stick to the spirit when one leaves them.