“SQUATTERPUNK LIVE! at CINEMALAYA”

A film concert featuring KHAVN’s “Squatterpunk”
& the live music of THE BROCKAS
at the CINEMALAYA Film Festival 2007

6PM, this Saturday, July 28, 2007.
Tanghalang Huseng Batute (Studio Theater),
CCP (Cultural Center of the Philippines),
Roxas Boulevard.
Tickets at P100 only (Students P50).

SQUATTERPUNK
This is not a film by Khavn

FESTIVALS:
Grand Jury Prize, Cinemanila International Film
Festival
Opening Film, Sonatrope Film Festival, Hong Kong
Rotterdam International Film Festival, The Netherlands
Singapore International Film Festival, Singapore
IndieLisboa International Film Festival, Portugal
Brisbane International Film Festival, Australia
Euganea Movie Movement Film Festival, Italy
Urban Nomad Film Festival, Taiwan
Hamburg Documentary Film Festival, Germany

The best social realist documentary in the
Philippines, SQUATTERPUNK is a daring and adventurous
film shot in the kind of slum neighbourhood where
police protection is rare. The film, energetic and
funny in a place that is supposed to be depressing,
does not exactly fit into the social awareness
approach of a direct cinema documentary. The score of
the film is loud if not deafening. And not in vogue.
Director Khavn, the enfant terrible of Filipino
cinema, brings us back to the ‘no future’ eighties of
authentic anarchic punk. But it is consistent in its
style of black-and-white images and its rhythmic
montage that is clearly driven by the music-based
sound track. Compared to the ironic collage way of
working in most of Khavn’s other films, this one is
crystal clear if not neat. Well, only in comparison
with his other sometimes exuberant experiments. By any
other standard, it is a wild and pulsating film.
SQUATTERPUNK shows something of life in the slums in a
quite special way. It shows how poor, forgotten and
ignored children can have a good time. Playing and
swimming in rotting garbage can apparently be fun. So
it is not the cliché image of tears in a child’s eyes
that makes us aware of this disgraceful situation but
the vitality and pleasure of the protagonists. In
addition, maybe even stronger than pity, this pleasure
enforces the inevitable message: no future. (Gertjan
Zuilhof, Rotterdam International Film Festival)

"Squatter" is the N-word of the Phippines, suggesting
the poorest of its Third World inhabitants only one
rung up from living in Manila’s garbage citadel of
Tondo. Hardly a cause for Squatter Pride, but Filmless
Films’ Khavn, the bleached enfant terrible of the new
Philippines digital scene, may convince you otherwise.
Filmed in just one day, SQUATTERPUNK follows an eight
year old Slum King, a cocky would-be gangster with a
Travis Bickle haircut, and his ratbag 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 frolick 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, fuelled by the mostly improvised punk score by
Khavn’s outfit The Brockas. Performed live in Brisbane
by Khavn and his motley crew of local misfits, the
relentless clang-bang drowns the need for dialogue or
background noise, leaving a stark impression without
comment and, more significantly, without judgement.
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.
(Andrew Leavold, Brisbane International Film Festival)

I vogue on the juxtapose. Punk's a beer commercial
these days, a T-shirt, an ad campaign trope. The
“punk” in SQUATTERPUNK refers to before that. Refers
to nihilism, the punk dictum --- nothing from nothing,
life at less than zero, rebelling against whatever
you've got, no future. But the “squatter” in
SQUATTERPUNK refers to the scabby, depleted ,
claustrophobic and overfamiliar subculture living off
the liposucked fat of the land.The kids swimming in
black water , the scavenger family making supper from
detritus, the festering sores. Infiltrated and staked
out with an unflinching eye, this is social realism
without arrogance or agenda , but the immediacy of
Bobby Balingit's incoherent punk rock bristle feeds
the oddly upbeat parallels and subtexts --- punk was
also autonomy, shock value, will to power --- turning
outrage into a kind of catharsis . (Dodo Dayao,
Piling-Piling Pelikula)

Tweaking the poverty documentaries omnipresent in
festival circles, SQUATTERPUNK turns its camera on a
group of children living in a squalid Manila slum.
Unlike most poverty documentaries, the film is less
concerned (or not concerned at all, actually) with
making any points about the hopelessness of their
condition, but instead follows the kids as they play
and walk around like little tough guys, complete with
Mohawks and a fuck-you attitude. (Jason Sanders,
Filmmaker Magazine & Cinemascope Magazine)

SQUATTERPUNK wants it viewers to be prepared for a
feature-length music video quite unlike anything MTV
is likely to broadcast. Shot in black-and-white to
relentless punk rock energy, its "stars" are squatter
kids living off the waste of Manila. Diving into dark
waters teeming with refuse and scavenging for food,
the nameless next generation still make time to shave
their heads Mohawk style and bang madly on makeshift
drums or strum beaten up guitars. (Philip Cheah,
Singapore International Film Festival)

A rollicking ride into the depths of poverty-inspired
despair, with that distinctly Philippine sense of
hope, rising above the regular smell of garbage,
swinging and slamming with joyous riot music. This is
Khavn returning to the bare, essential, and simply
punk. (Joel Toledo, Bridport Prize Winner for Poetry)

Despite the crude, violent, exploitative connotations
of its title, SQUATTERPUNK casts a tenderly poetic eye
at the squalor of Philippine society. (Lourd De Veyra,
Palanca Awardee for Essay & Teleplay)

Pinoy Punk Rock is the music that reflects the lively
and chaotic world of the urban poor in an independent
masterpiece titled SQUATTERPUNK by the internationally
award-winning director Khavn. (Jude Bautista, Manila
Times)

CREDITS:
Directed, Written, & Produced by Khavn
Cinematography by Albert Banzon
Edited by Lawrence S. Ang
Recorded Music by Bobby Balingit, Delakrus, The
Brockas
Stills by Buccino De Ocampo
Assistant Direction by Rayg Generoso
Starring Hapon & the Isla Puting Bato Community
Running Time: 80 minutes

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