A look at the 2025 QCShorts International Event 2
By Bronte H. Lakshmana, reporter
The QCINEMA International Film Festival's shorts program has expanded this year to 26 films, spread across five sections. In QCShorts International 2, five filmmakers turn their attention to the realities that fuel resistance within communities, families, and society as a whole.
The special, titled “The Center Cannot Hold,” takes its name from Allyn Sacks' 2007 memoir of her tumultuous psychological journey, named after a line from William Butler Yeats's apocalyptic poem “The Second Coming.” It is a genealogy of losing grip on a centered reality, joined by the voices of those who want to fight in the most unexpected ways.
In addition to offering a glimpse of Southeast Asia's untouched countryside, these five films create a fragmented yet interconnected – but certainly poignant – experience.
vox humana
The experience begins with an invitation to listen. The landscape is so dreamlike with the wind rustling the leaves of the trees, blowing through the stalks of grass in the hilly areas. Strong human voices, the sound of galloping horses, a man's nails outlining rough dirt on an old wall – images and sounds question the ties that bind humans to the earth.
Don Ablahan's poetic narrative, home from the Toronto International Film Festival, offers a vision of a future ethnographic endeavor. A sound recordist listens, officials watch, a biologist witnesses the power of the indigenous. We can only see and hear the accounts amid the disconnect.
when the blues move on
This time there is direct conversation. The voice of a young man recounting a haunting dream to his father, whose experiences are unknown to us, but could potentially be a connecting thread in Indonesia's history of restless energy, protest, anger, and hope. We see photographs of these events, rendered in blue cyanotype. We hear an emotional protest poem by a student activist.
Benny Cristea's personal documentary is intimate, but also large in scope, as it traces one man's thoughts and feelings inside the larger story of a nation attempting to reinvent itself. Although simple and straightforward, it is a monument to the memories of the struggle that is full of heart.
a metamorphosis
Lin Htet Aung's lo-fi broadcast is a confusing but interesting watch that mimics the aesthetics of Myanmar's state television propaganda. It combines fascinating visuals such as distorted digital images and short fuzzy videos with the voice of an old man singing a Burmese lullaby.
Coming across as almost eerie, it pulls back a (seemingly immovable) curtain to reveal the strange liminal spaces that have emerged from a country under dictatorship. Using a nationalistic medium, the film fights back creatively, bravely, although it also has the potential of a video installation played on an old box television.
Yes, yes, ingat!
Recipient of a QCShorts 2025 grant, Norwin de los Santos's ballad about two siblings searching for a way out of the misery of the urban poor is the most entertaining and heart-touching short of the bunch. An aging young girl and her hard-working older brother take a damaged family jeepney to go on an adventure to escape the hell that is Manila.
Stories of the underprivileged are not always presented with such pure playfulness and empathy. In a world where metropolises are forever under construction, slums and jeepneys in danger of being swept away by massive commercial developments, Bhing and Baby's story is a small dream worth seeing.
Si Kara: Ang Babae Naga Naga Daba-Daba
Set in Bacolod, Dale's absurdist comedy QCShorts 2025 is another recipient of the grant. It is a showcase of what the cinema of Negros Occidental can offer, as Cara's character goes through a series of tests where the heat built up in her body becomes so unbearable that the changes in her lifestyle and environment accelerate. It's a riot to behold, as toxic pink human gases are poisoning rivers and rumbling in the mountains.
A lot of it is decidedly lowbrow humor, including endless poop and fart jokes. But much is expressed – neon-painted people dancing in a club Badouts And Cara's motionless body in the boiling-hot room – all this reflects the fever dream that has gripped the Filipino. Struggling with a climate that is becoming hotter by the day and a social landscape that is becoming more chaotic by the day, this short story concludes a strong set that presents exactly how people can resist larger forces with imagined images.
Screenings of QCShorts International 2 will take place on November 21 at 3:45 pm at Fisher Mall and at 9:20 pm at Gateway 2.
