MANILA, Philippines – Touted as its largest iteration thus far, boasting 77 short and full-length titles, this year’s QCinema International Film Festival debuts exciting sections such as the scaled-up QCShorts International, QCinema Selects, QCLokal, and Contemporary Italian Cinema. 

Under QCLokal, a curated selection featuring Filipino talents, are films like John Torres’s Room in a Crowd, made chiefly out of lockdown footage which includes a live sound performance from Torres and artist Itos Ledesma; and Khavn’s Makamisa: Phantasm of Revenge, an avant-garde reimagining of José Rizal’s unfinished third novel, which competed at this year’s FIDMarseille and later won best feature at the Lausanne Underground Film and Music Festival.

Past this, the exhibition section draws focus to six standout short films: Pabelle Manikan’s Brownout Capital, Nicole Matti’s Forgetting Clara, Joanne Cesario’s Invisible Labor, Shiri de Leon’s May Puso ba ang Manika?, Maria Estela Paiso’s Objects Do Not Randomly Fall from the Sky, and Glenn Barit’s Yung Huling Swimming Reunion Before Life Happens. Five of these shorts, save for Invisible Labor, are having their world premieres at the festival. 

Here, we spotlight five female directors in the shorts expo program whose works find a cardinal point in their preoccupations about struggles moving past the individual and towards the collective and whose vantage points animate QCinema’s insistence on “the gaze.”

Joanne Cesario

Joanne Cesario’s Invisible Labor is not forged out of thin air. If anything, it is a result of her tireless effort as a labor rights advocate, as a cultural worker.

Before Cesario joined labor group Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU) as its vice chairperson for women’s affairs, she has long been active in producing materials on and for the labor sector. 

In a series of discussions on disinformation and distortion on ground, which largely factored into the 2022 national elections, she and her fellow advocates mulled over creative channels to confront such issues and relate it to the masses, and eventually realized how pivotal it was to mainstream labor history, which is often sidelined and excluded in educational institutions.

So began the Philippine Labor Movement Archive, established in June 2022 by KMU alongside Mayday Multimedia, Tambisan sa Sining, EILER, and Balai Obrero Foundation. The movement focused on archiving countless photographs, documents, video and audio work since KMU’s inception in 1980 so as to map the very lives that make up the backbone of this country.

In the process of archiving, Cesario encountered the story of Carlito Piedad, a utility worker at IBON Foundation credited for rewinding KMU videotapes from 1998 to 2006 for its preservation.

It was in September 2022 that Cesario realized that Piedad’s invisible work was meant to be a film and quickly began production that month. The short, now being expanded into a full-length title, secured funding from the Singapore International Film Festival and Purin Pictures. 

The project’s completion, says Cesario, is “intense and taxing.” “It’s all in, and there’s no detachment from the material. The film itself is about the labor movement, where we as film workers are also part of. The characters are close to us, the featured archives are processed by us, and the campaigns and activities are led by us,” she says in Taglish.

“But that’s how it is, every waking day we choose to commit to this — to filmmaking and to the labor movement,” she continues.

That Cesario credits Brian Sulicipan, Alyssa Suico, Tel Delvo, Mervine Aquino, Kat Catalan, Francis Manaog, Josh Paradeza, Kim Louise Valmores, and Miguel Hernandez as her co-creators in the first few seconds of the film only proves that this isn’t her work alone. 

Behind her is a community that soldiers on, in spite.

Pabelle Manikan

Pabelle Manikan’s Brownout Capital began with the director’s trip to Palawan to visit her relatives, a trip that was marked with constant power outages lasting for about three to seven days.

“The idea evolved during a party where people were dancing and enjoying the night with blasting music, then suddenly the lights shut off,” she says. 

Manikan found the experience at once “frustrating and humorous.” Then came the impulse to put that encounter to the screen. She shot the film for about a month in Palawan and edited it for a year.

Initially, she wasn’t really sure how the story would unfurl. “I kept filming, observing, and feeling the good and the bad; waiting for things to unfold, asking questions, meeting other people (most didn’t make the cut, the ones in this cut are mostly my relatives); and learning more about other people’s lives, struggles, and dreams (but this could be a different film, too),” she tells me.

Creative producer Wena Sanchez and creative consultant Martika Escobar also helped her fine-tune several iterations of the project, 17 drafts to be exact. “Brownout Capital was the first story that came out of the hours of footage that I had shot.”

Manikan hopes the film could do something for the communities often at the receiving end of this routine articulation of state neglect.

Shiri De Leon

Originally a pitch for last year’s QCShorts and later turned into a thesis film, Shiri De Leon’s May Puso Ba Ang Isang Manika, could be traced back to the director’s childhood experience of seeing a sex doll for the the first time at a sex shop next to the place where her family would buy pirated DVDs. 

Upon the urging of fellow filmmaker and friend Jaime Morados, De Leon submitted the film to QCinema, and realized later on that its premiere at the festival is a full-circle moment.

Francesca Renee – her executive producer, production designer, and thesis partner – co-captained the film until it came into fruition, solely relying on crowdfunding and personal shares from their earnings as freelance filmmakers.

“There was still a gap, but we were grateful enough to have Ark Productions help when we needed the last boost to make the film,” she says.

They shot the project in Marikina around March this year. Despite the pressure, De Leon says the collaboration with Bembol Roco, one of her actors, made the experience more surreal. “Having him on set was both inspiring and humbling.”

She adds, “It reminded me that even as a student filmmaker, I could step up to the challenge, embrace the learning curve, and harness the energy of those around me to create something meaningful through the simple passion of wanting to tell the story.”

De Leon is also delighted to share this journey with Glenn Barit, who served as her script consultant. “His insights and expertise greatly contributed to shaping and developing my project, making his involvement in this program even more meaningful to me,” she says.

Nicole Matti

Forgetting Clara, a non-linear narrative experimental film, which director Nicole Matti worked on for about a year, began as her thesis project at UP Diliman.

The film, she says, “delves into the complexity of womanhood” as well as “the importance of pushing back against the masculine gaze in both life and cinema.”

It was produced under Reality MM Studios, where the director had been working for several years, beginning as a production assistant. Erik Matti, Nicole’s father known for titles like On the Job and Honor Thy Father, and Dondon Monteverde served as executive producers, who at the same time provided creative input into the film.

Pre-production got going around the second week of March this year, followed by principal photography on April 14 and 21.

The film marks Matti’s directorial debut, and she says it’s “both thrilling and nerve-wracking.” “Making Forgetting Clara felt like peeling back layers of myself, exposing parts I usually keep hidden — not just to my crew, but eventually to everyone who would see the film.”

She also reveals that she has long been eyeing to work with Mina Cruz, the film’s lead, “but the timing or project never lined up,” until this one.

“Watching her bring this character to life was incredible. She understood what I was going for without needing to say it, which made our collaboration feel organic,” she says of Cruz.

Apart from this, to be sharing space alongside female directors, says Matti, feels “truly empowering.” 

“There’s a certain strength and solidarity that comes from knowing we’re all here telling stories that matter to us, stories that reflect our realities, and sometimes challenge the expectations placed on us as women in this industry,” she asserts.

Maria Estela Paiso

Maria Estela Paiso was actually hoping to submit her latest short Objects Do Not Fall Randomly From the Sky to QCinema’s QCSEA Shorts Competition, only for the festival to overhaul its mechanics this year. That is, until programmer Jason Tan Liwag informed Paiso about the possibility of curating a Filipino exhibition program for the festival’s 12th edition.

The project, which Paiso says is a response to It’s Raining Frogs Outside, her 2021 short that entered the Criterion Channel in May this year, started with a message to her producer Gale Osorio about the actual title. “It’s funny because it’s the film’s title that often comes to me first,” she says in Filipino.

She explains further, “There should be no more falling objects. Then [it’s set in] Masinloc, [Zambales]. Then hip hop. Blue.”

Shortly after that, she wrote an eight-page script that later went under an incubator program in Objectifs. But the actual production was not until September 2023. 

At the time, Paiso, whose Nightbirds is among the shorts that opened this year’s QCinema, was already in contact with some Masinloc fisherfolk but the family suffered a loss a week before their shoot dates. She later got acquainted with New Masinloc Fishermen’s Association, who allowed them to hold production in their community.

It’s a difficult process, admits Paiso. Like in her previous short, there were only seven of them on set within limited shooting days. She adds, “It’s really different to only hear news about what is happening [in their hometown] than actually talking to those who are experiencing it.” 

Funding for the film came from what was left from Frogs alongside Tarzeer Pictures, DFarm, as well as the Zambales-based Alon and Araw Club chiefly for the plastic materials used in the film. Past this, the animation and post-production process took some time. 

Be that as it may, it warms Paiso’s heart that more female directors are offered space in the festival’s programming. 

“When I was a QCShorts grantee, I was the only woman in the program,” she says. – Rappler.com

Note: Some quotes in Filipino have been translated into English for brevity.