Sensing Film by our guest of honour, the Philippine Filmmaker and Director John Torres. 

For a few days, we will see other possibilities of making films, either alone or with others. We can try and see how rhythm plays a part, registering emotions in things we show and hide, how stories unfold, what things we can find to make things more practical, not so much to clearly answer but to propose and ask, and why it’s okay not to be sure all the time. We think about process over output. Hopefully, this gives us an idea of other ways to pursue later on.

John is an independent filmmaker, musician and writer. He has made more than a dozen short films and five features. His work fictionalizes and reworks personal and found documentations of love, family relations, and memory in relation to current events, hearsays, myth, and folklore. He teaches part-time at the Ateneo de Manila University and UP Film Institute and co-organizes artist talks and screenings in Los Otros, a Manila-based space, film lab, and platform committed to the intersections of film and art, with a focus on process over product. A special focus of his works has been shown at the Viennale, Seoul, Cosquin, and Bangkok.

Personal Little Stories by Ghazi Alqudcy

There are stories everywhere. Let’s walk through Ghazi’s cinematic universe as he crafts personal stories that have allowed him to produce more than sixty short films. Rather than creating stories, he prefers to document stories – his own personal stories.

Ghazi Alqudcy holds a Master of Fine Arts in Filmmaking from film factory, an intensive programme created by the Hungarian film Director Béla Tarr. He has produced more than sixty short films, which screened at various film festivals in Europe and Asia. In 2014, he produced a feature length omnibus documentary ‘Lost in Bosnia’ – a collective poem about the act of filmmaking at a critical, (film-)historical moment. His directorial debut feature film, ‘Temporary Visa’, was awarded Best Film (Discovery Section) at the Asian Film Festival Barcelona. His second omnibus, ‘Letters from the ends of the world’ (2021) was the opening film at the Sarajevo Film Festival. He is currently a senior lecturer at Sunway University.

Film Festivals by Lim Wei Jie

Film festivals articulate a necessarily narrow series of programs. What are some of the local, ethical, and political contestations and stakes involved in film curatorial practices? In this open-ended conversation, we explore and discuss some of the impulses guiding film festival selection and admission.

Lim Wei Jie graduated from Tisch, NYU with a double-major in Philosophy and Film/TV production. He’s an alumnus of the New York Film Festival’s Critics Academy and Tokyo International Film Festival’s Southeast Asia Programmer’s Workshop. He served as the program director of SeaShorts Film Festival in 2020 & 2021.