This year’s QCShorts International at the QCinema International Film Festival (QCIFF) expands the festival’s vision of Film City through an ambitious showcase of 33 films from 21 countries. Curated into six thematic programs, the lineup traverses experimental cinema, animation, documentary, and fiction, highlighting the short film as a powerful space for artistic and social dialogue.
Programmer and film critic Jason Tan Liwag shares, “The expansion of QCinema’s short film program is part of the festival’s commitment to leveraging the short film as a form for experimentation and storytelling while also honoring how it has been involved in much larger global conversations, especially as a city of film.”
Within QCShorts International is a competition section featuring six local homegrown shorts, which received grants from QCinema, competing alongside fifteen Southeast Asian films. These films are distributed across four programs.
Taking its title from Eve Driver’s collection of poems, Program 1: “This Vast Artifice” opens QCShorts International with five Southeast Asian shorts that probe the fragility and illusions of urban utopia. Springing from the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand, these films trace how innocence, hope, dreams, and desires collapse against the architecture of the modern city.
The films are As If To Nothing by Pek Jia Ho and Ang Jia Jung (Singapore), Honey, My Love, So Sweet by JT Trinidad (Philippines), Please P(r)ay Attention by Vasupol Suwanjuta (Thailand), QCinema grantee Surface Tension by The Serrano Sisters (Philippines), and QCinema grantee Yelo by Gab Rosique (Philippines).
Program 2: “The Center Cannot Hold” borrows its title from American psychoanalyst Elyn Saks’ 2007 memoir and gathers five Southeast Asian shorts that grapple with the forces of resistance amid personal and societal breakdowns. Emerging from Indonesia, Myanmar, and Philippine provinces, these films unfold within fractured realities where lives teeter between grief and hope, repression and liberation, madness and clarity.
The lineup includes A Metamorphosis by Lin Htet Aung (Myanmar), QCinema grantee Hoy, Hoy, Ingat! (Hey, Hey, Take Care!) by Norvin de los Santos (Philippines), QCinema grantee Si Kara: Ang Babaye Nga Nag Daba-Daba (Kara: The Burning Woman) by Dale (Philippines), Vox Humana by Don Josephus Eblahan (Philippines, USA, Singapore), and When the Blues Goes Marching In by Beny Kristia (Indonesia).
Program 3: “This Is Where I Leave You” presents shorts whose characters are bound by the weight of abandonment. These stories trace the tender, uneasy act of letting go of home, of memory, of love that no longer returns the same way. Set in familiar yet fading landscapes, these films explore the quiet spaces where endings take shape and where the promise of motion hints at new beginnings.
This program features Agapito by Arvin Belarmino and Kyla Danelle Romero (Philippines, France), Before the Sea Forgets by Lê Ngọc Duy (Singapore), Grandma Nai Who Played Favorites by Chheangkea (Cambodia, France, USA), Sammi, Who Can Detach His Body Parts by Rein Maychaelson (Indonesia), and Visiting Heaven Gate by Nghiêm Quỳnh Trang (Vietnam, Czech Republic).
The final competition program of QCShorts International, Program 4: “We Were Once Small Things,” unites six Southeast Asian shorts into a decade-spanning, cross-country tapestry of coming-of-age. These vibrant, deeply personal films from Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines feature children reckoning with ancestry, land ownership, loneliness, loss, and intimacy.
Designed for a young audience, it includes Baby Fat by Margarita Mina (USA, Philippines), In the Valley by Lim Han Loong (Malaysia), Little Rebels Cinema Club by Khozy Rizal (Indonesia), My Plastic Mother by Amar Haikal (Indonesia), QCinema grantee Ours Was A Timeless Night Burning by Lauviah Caliboso (Philippines), and QCinema grantee RUNO! by Lysa Catolico and Jazmine Gin Pateña (Philippines).
Beyond its competition programs, QCinema spotlights two exhibition programs under QCShorts Expo. The first is titled “Unthinkable Atrocities” and features films that explore the indescribably horrific—from Lovecraftian horrors and folkloric curses to extreme censorship and real-world genocide. These award-winning works from a new generation of auteurs, including Mattie Do, Jocelyn Charles, Mohammed Almughanni, Neo Sora, Maryam Tafakory, and Christopher Radcliff, challenge traditional depictions of conflict and expand the boundaries of film as tool to capture and imagine atrocities and social intervention.
The second is a recently added sixth program that marks the return of the 2024 QCinema grantees. Titled “Unhealthy Fixations”, these shorts tackle obsessions with parental failure, childhood trauma, the surveillance state, climate change, workplace equity, and bodily insecurities. From childhood dramas and body horror to post-apocalyptic romcoms and heist films, the shorts in this program map the endless lengths we go to attain the object of our desires.
The films are Refrain by Joseph Dominic Cruz, Alaga by Nicole Rosacay, RAMPAGE! (o ang parada) by Kukay Bautista Zinampan, Water Sports by Whammy Alcazaren, Kinakausap ni Celso ang Diyos (What Did the Sky Tell You, Celso?) by Gilb Baldoza, and Supermassive Heavenly Body by Sam Villa-Real.
Tickets per program are P250. QCinema will run from November 14 to 23, 2025, at Gateway, Trinoma, Eastwood, Fisher Mall, Cloverleaf, and Robinsons Galleria. For more details, visit qcinema.ph.
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