THIS IS NOT A KHAVN FIILMOGRAPHY

A man goes on a thanking spree.

The start of the film sets the tone. A tortured man looks as if he will castrate himself. Later he staggers aimlessly and bleeding heavily through the streets of a town that is just waking up. In parallel, the film shows the marital discussions of a couple, with the husband hiding behind the camera.

A strange and dysfunctional family sits down three times a day to a meal of soil.

Strikingly captivating and accessible short film by someone who tends to make more experimental and raw films, even though the situation in the film is raw enough as it is. We follow Piling, a young soccer fanatic, through a slum district of Manila. No ball or cleats, but a Coke can and flip-flops are the ingredients for a virtuoso demonstration of the football art. Only at the end does it become apparent why the little ball juggler will never be a Ronaldinho.

These boys know the dual essence of rugby: playing football and sniffing solvent. They tell vampire jokes, rap about river deaths, and dive like jack-knives into the murky water. The cruel irony of the hope these children bring.

The film Our Daily Bread takes place in the slums and captures a day in the life of one family that makes a living collecting garbage in the streets. Poverty is the highest degree of futility, the consummate absence of freedom.

The Pinoy vampire - a bloodthirsty Aswang - stalks the streets of Quezon City in search of fresh victims while attempting to stay one step ahead of a dangerous human predator. Gruesome and grisly murders are our entry point into the psyche of the Aswang of Quezon City. More a meditation on the workings of a disturbed mind than a detective thriller, it nonetheless shows us a cat and mouse mind game. We watch and squirm in terror as the Pinoy vampire strikes again and again.

Filmed in just one day, Squatterpunk follows an eight year old Slum King named Hapon, a cocky would-be gangster with a Travis Bickle haircut, and his rat-bag minions through one of the thousands of shanty towns that spring up between the cracks in the Manila pavements. The manic collage of stunning hand-held black and white images capture kids being kids as they frolic amidst the cardboard and corrugated walls of home-sweet-home and the surrounding debris, human and otherwise. Like watching infants at play at a car crash, it's a mesmerizing, almost seamless collision of social realism and visual poetry. It's a rush to the heart, too, fueled by the mostly improvised punk score by Khavn's outfit The Brockas. The relentless clang-bang drowns the need for dialog or most background noise, leaving a stark impression without comment and, more significantly, without judgment. A vivid and jarring collection of postcards of innocence at the brink of a short and possibly non-existent adolescence, of simple pleasures amidst appalling squalor, of human junk that society ignores in a country the rest of the world prefers to forget.

A tribute-cum-reformulation-in-film of Philippine National Hero Jose Rizal's poem "Mi Ultimo Adios"

A sturdy man with a dark expression follows a delicate beauty, clad in innocent white clothes, through the streets of Manila. In his attempt to keep her away from the trash and vice of the metropolis, he becomes a murderer. Sometimes he simply stands around with his arms folded, observing people in the streets and unleashing tirades of hatred in the form of an inner monologue. Yet at the same time, he repeatedly proceeds to horrible crimes, which he considers himself chosen to commit.