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On October 22, 2024, the QCinema International Film Festival announced its much-anticipated lineup for this year, with The Gaze as its central theme. With 76 titles—22 short films and 55 full-length features—spanning across 11 distinct sections, the festival invites audiences to explore diverse perspectives through film. The Gaze seeks to challenge and expand how we view the world, from traditional masculine and feminine perspectives to new and transformative ways of seeing.

Quezon City Mayor Maria Josefina Belmonte officially opened the occasion, emphasizing QCinema’s vital role in advancing the city government’s cultural policies. She highlighted the festival’s contribution to Quezon City’s vision for sustainability and environmental friendliness, underscoring the partnership between the city and the festival to fulfill these goals.

The 12th edition of QCinema will open with Directors’ Factory Philippines, an omnibus film project in collaboration with Cannes Directors’ Fortnight. The project features four films created by Filipino directors alongside filmmakers from neighboring countries.

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For regular updates, sign up for our weekly email newsletter and follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSGoodbye, Dragon Inn.It’s getting harder to go to the movies. IndieWire surveys the state of cinemagoing in the US region by region as multiplexes continue to shutter. From downtown Detroit, the closest first-run theater is now in Canada.More than 500 pro-Palestinian demonstrators staged a sit-in at MoMA on Saturday, protesting the museum trustees’ alleged investments in weapons used by the Israeli military in Gaza. The museum closed its doors to the public and rescheduled planned programming.After confirming that three sitting representatives of the far-right AfD party had been invited to tomorrow night’s Berlinale opening ceremony, amid public outcry, the festival has now disinvited them.REMEMBERINGRocky II.The tributes to Carl Weathers continue to roll in after his death last week at the...

LGBT films are more in quantity and better in quality during the last few years, with Asia paving the way in a number of ways. However, I do not think that any of the films has been as daring, both in cinematic approach and its presentation of the particular theme, than Whammy Alcazaren's “Bold Eagle”, a 20-minutes short that has already had a successful festival run around the world, and will screen in Sundance in 2024.

Bold Eagle is screening at Qcinema

A man is sitting naked by the door of his cramped apartment, while a talking cat appears and disappears around him. Soon he starts licking himself and crawling on the floor, just a like a cat himself. A Pov sequence seems to mirror the gaze of the cat, while the next scene has the man lying on his bed, with his naked back side (including his genitalia) in full view.

Sam Manacsa worked as Art Director on award-winning films such as Carlo Francisco Manatad's “Whether the Weather Is Fine”. Her short film, “If People Such as We Cease to Exist” (2016), was selected at Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Competition. “Cross My Heart and Hope To Die”was selected to premiere at the 80th La Biennale Venice International Film Festival in the official Orizzonti Short Films Competition and was later screened in Qcinema. The short has already received a number of awards from all over the world, while it is also worth mentioning that a number of filmmakers are also involved in an all-star production that also includes Yov Moor as colorist.

Cross My Heart and Hope to Die screened at Qcinema

The movie begins with a scene that would be laughably absurd if it was not so shockingly dramatic, essentially setting the tone for the film and justifying a number of...

Six film projects currently at development stage have been selected to take part in a workshop session as part of mylab+@Jogja next month. The six share a common characteristic of Indonesian co-production and a recurring theme of luminescence.

“This theme underscores the importance of having the distinctive light of Asian cinema arise from its own characteristics. The participants reflect the new hope of Asian cinema with a fresh and authentic perspective. With this kind of program I really hope Asian films continue to shine by their own characters and beauty throughout the world,” said Ifa Isfansyah, producer, director and festival director of the Jogja-netpac Asian Film Festival.

Selected from over 60 applications, the six include a mix of youth on the directing side and experience on the producing side

They include: “A Ballad of Long Hair” with director-scriptwriter Giovanni Rustanto, producer Annisa Adjam and co-producer Fran Borgia; “Carpet” (aka “Karpet”) (Malaysia) with director Mien.

British thriller Femme was also on the prize list.

The Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal has revealed the winners of its jury awards, with Canadian cyber thriller Red Rooms (Les Chambres Rouges) named best feature in the event’s Cheval Noir competition section.

Red Rooms also won the best screenplay prize for Quebec writer-director Pascal Plante, the best score award for Dominique Plante and one of the two outstanding performance awards for Juliette Gariépy.

The Cheval Noir best director award went to Sam H Freeman and Ng Choon Ping for their UK thriller Femme, whose Nathan Stewart-Jarrett won the other outstanding performance award.

The Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal is more than halfway through its 27th edition, which is running from July 20th through August 9th – and over the weekend they unveiled their list of Fantasia Film Festival Awards winners, with major honors going to the likes of Red Rooms and Stay Online.

Our own reviewer Tyler Nichols gave Red Rooms a 9/10 “amazing” review (you can read it Here), so it makes sense to hear that the film racked up multiple awards, including Best Feature, Best Screenplay for Pascal Plante, Best Score for Dominique Plante, and Outstanding Performance for Juliette Gariépy. We haven’t had the chance to see Stay Online yet, but that movie did earn the Best First Feature award for director Yeva Strelnikova.

Red Rooms is about what happens when the case of a serial killer who streamed his murders in the “red rooms” of the Dark Web goes to trial,...

Red Rooms won a leading three awards including Best Feature at the 27th annual Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal, with the thriller Femme taking Best Director for Sam H. Freeman & Ng Choon Ping and Outstanding Performance for Nathan Stewart-Jarrett. See the full list of winners below.

“The ultimate effect a film can achieve is to implant a significant and lasting emotional memory,” the genre fest’s jury said in a statement. “The jury was unanimously convinced that [Red Rooms] masterfully accomplished that goal.”

In writer-director Pascal Plante’s thriller from Nemesis Films, the case of a serial killer who streamed his murders in the “red rooms” of the Dark Web goes to trial, and Kelly-Anne (Laurie Babin) is obsessed. She goes down a dark path to obtain the final piece of the case’s puzzle.

In Femme, after drag artist Jules (Stewart-Jarrett) sees his closeted assailant (George Mackay) at a gay sauna,...

Exclusive: Filipino production house Daluyong Studios, founded by Alemberg Ang, a co-producer on Japan’s Best International Feature Oscars submission Plan 75, is partnering with Tan Si En’s Singapore-based Momo Film Co to co-produce a slate of features and documentaries.

The joint slate includes feature films Don’t Cry, Butterfly, from rising Vietnamese filmmaker Duong Dieu Linh; and Tropical Rain, Death-Scented Kiss, directed by US-Singapore animation filmmaker Charlotte Hong Bee Her; as well as short film and feature Bold Eagle, directed by the Philippines’ Whammy Alcazaren; and documentary feature Tens Across The Borders, from Sze-Wei Chan.

Daluyong previously partnered with Tan Si En and Anthony Chen’s Giraffe Pictures on Some Nights I Feel Like Walking, from Filipino filmmaker Petersen Vargas, which is currently in pre-production. The project, about a teenage runaway who falls in with a group of hustlers, won the Seafic Award at the 2019 Southeast Asia Fiction...

Having watched a number of Manatad’s works as an editor (particularly his collaborations with Khavn) and a number of his short films, it had become clear to me that he really has what it takes to become a great filmmaker. “Whether the Weather is Fine” proves the fact in the best fashion.

“Whether the Weather is Fine” is screening in Locarno Film Festival

On November 8th, 2013, the strongest tropical cyclone ever recorded, Typhoon Haiyan, made landfall in Eastern Philippines, destroying most of the director’s hometown, Tacloban. Taking the aftermath of the destruction as his foundation, Manatad revolves his story around Miguel, a desperate young man who has been suffering all his life by his inner demons that usually manifest in the form of dreams, who tries to find his girlfriend Andrea and his mother, Norma. As soon as he finds them both, he tries to convince them to leave the rundown city,...

2013 was the year when Erik Matti released On the Job, showing the world that there was more to the Philippines than the suffering and dolor most of its films so valiantly depict. It was also the year when filmmakers Siege Ledesma (Shift), Jerrold Tarog (Sana Dati), and Whammy Alcazaren (Islands) broke away from the usual mold to tackles various facets of love that would be too complicated for commercial cinema. Norte, Hangganan ng Kasaysayan (Norte, the End of History), 2013's best film, even had Lav Diaz breaching his trademark aesthetics of monochromatic long takes to deliver a narrative that is comparatively easier to digest but still powerful like no other.2014 saw Cinemalaya and Cinema One Originals, the Philippines' most reliable fund granters, actively seek out...

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The easiest thing to do is to either stop at faulting or praising Whammy Alcazaren's ambition in mounting Islands, a deeply personal meditation on the complexities of loving. The film is hardly about the director's ambition. It is more about his humility in communicating how imperfect he is as a person in love. The film, despite its visual elegance, has the affecting awkwardness of a juvenile poem. Like a poem, it is replete with obvious metaphors, from the solitary spacemen to the despondent hunter, that pertain to one nagging idea: the inability to communicate love. Its stanzas are all beautifully composed. They are fragile sequences, all carefully designed to evoke a somber mood. In a forest, a hunter longs for the love of a princess...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...