KEKA

Although still in his early 20s, Henares has established himself forcefully in the Filipino cinema - he is a winner of the prestigious Palanca script writing award, he directed his first feature (and commercially successful) Gamitan at 21, he has a band, is a DJ, and has also written other features such as First Time His second film, Keka is an unlikely combination of romance, comedy and violence that strangely works on the screen. A young call center operator named Keka (short for Francesca and played by sexy starlet Katya Santos) seeks revenge for the murder of her boyfriend Jordan Herrera. He was killed by members of a rival fraternity gang led by Ryan Eigenmann who has since become a matinee idol on TV and in the movies. Unable to get over the loss of her boyfriend, Keka decides to train under Jordan’s best friend, Vhong Navarro, and proceeds to kill the fraternity gang one by one. While she is embarked on her career as a serial killer, she meets and falls in love with Wendell Ramos, a policeman with psychosomatic asthma and a broken heart who has been assigned to investigate the series of murders she has so cleverly committed. Made well before Kill Bill, Henares’ film takes an inventive and mixed genre approach to his noirish material and fashions it into a black comedy. The best sequence in the movie is also one of its most daring if not surreal - a musical number in which Keka and all of the men in her life, living and dead, sing and dance about the strange situation in which they find themselves. Katya’s murder victims perform their dead hearts out, drenched in blood. The parts of Henares’ film may be more than the whole, but with smart casting especially the comedic surprise of Navarro and the brief but memorable Tuesday Vargas who plays Katya Santos’ nosey neighbor, and well-crafted writing, there is enough to dazzle in Henares’ film to light up a bright future for the youngest feature film director currently working in the Philippines.