Pinoy Party: Filipino Short Films

Showcasing the work of five essential, up-and-coming directors from the Philippines, brought together here by a strong sense of formal invention and a shared interest in notions of identity, belonging, and nostalgia, PINOY PARTY is a boisterous ode to the youth, to boundless imagination and to a desire for a different and brighter world.

In Kayla Abuda Galang’s carefully imagined WHEN YOU LEFT ME ON THAT BOULEVARD (SXSW 2023), teenager Ly and her cousins get blazing high before a boisterous Thanksgiving gathering at their auntie’s house. A beautifully nostalgic portrait of diasporic upbringing in the mid-aughts, culminating in an anthology karaoke sequence! In the Berlinale 2023-selected HITO, Stephen Lopez pays homage to the films of Nobuhiko Obayashi (HOUSE) and imagines how the 14-year-old Jani and a talking catfish named Kiefer may oppose a tyrannical world of nuclear reactors and military curfews, where people are utterly devoid of empathy. LUZONENSIS OSTEOPOROSIS, the latest from director Glenn Barit (CLEANERS) points to a prehistoric hominid getting ready to leave his home to work as a migrant worker overseas. When his passport goes missing, he ponder his place in the Philippines, in a surreal allegory for the country’s ongoing brain drain and relentless labour export policies.

In IT’S RAINING FROGS OUTSIDE (Sundance 2023), Maria Estela Paizo designs a spellbinding short that is one part pandemic diary, two part experimental travelogue, as her character Maya goes back to her home province of Zambales to confront her terrifying childhood home… filled with hailing amphibians. Last, but by no means least, Whammy Alcazaren’s BOLD EAGLE tells of the swelteringly hot acid trip of a sex-obsessed and terminally online gay man and his conveniently placed cat! A cocky commentary on censorship, dictatorship, and repression. – Ariel Esteban Cayer