Khavn, the most productive and versatile of Filipino filmmakers, shows the effects of a major and violent political event using a specific family story. Khavn can make crazy and ebullient films, but apparently also films that are serious and restrained. ‘Desaparadiso’ means distant from Paradise and refers to the people who disappeared in the black years, which started in 1972 when dictator Ferdinand Marcos held the country in a bench-vice. The years of Marcos’s state of siege remain a major political, social and cultural trauma in the Philippines and a source of inspiration for writers and filmmakers. Lav Diaz’s For What Is Before – a very different film, by the way, also being screened at this festival – is set in this period too. Many people disappeared and were murdered in that time, but Khavn concentrates on one disappearance and how his family had to come to terms with it. Only a couple of protagonists, a radio and an unmentionable disappearance.
