SEASON 2024-2025
AUGUST 27 - SEPTEMBER 15, 2025
BUKAS-SINTAS I OPENING FILMS
LORES OF FOLK, LURE THE LIGHT
‘Lores of Folk, Lure the Light’, Opening Film Porgram, brings together four evocative tales of folklore, memory, subculture, and the supernatural. Set in haunted spaces, silent plantations, nearby locales or enchanted forests, each story blurs the line between the seen and unseen. Folklore emerges as relic and as a living force, shaping relationships, echoing ancestral fears, and illuminating hidden truths within personal and collective memory.
Radikals
Arvin Belarmino I 2024 I
Philippines I 20:43 min I Folk, Mystery I Filipino w/ English subititles I
Southeast Asian Premiere
In the outskirts of Cavite, a young newcomer joins a tight-knit subculture devoted to bakte, a local freeform chicken-inspired dance rooted in rural folk tradition. After delivering a lackluster performance and drawing ridicule from a heckler, he becomes the group's weakest link. What begins as harmless initiation spirals into a surreal series of events, revealing the darker rituals that bind and break those who don’t measure up.
Arvin Belarmino is a Filipino filmmaker known for his bold, experimental, and narrative short films that explore the surreal within the everyday. His debut feature project Ria earned him a place at the prestigious 2022 Festival de Cannes Cinéfondation La Résidence, where he was awarded the CNC Pitch Prize. An alumnus of Talents Tokyo, Locarno Filmmakers Academy, Produire au Sud Nantes, and La Fabrique Cinéma, Arvin continues to gain international recognition. In 2024, he was selected for the Quinzaine des Cinéastes Fortnight Factory, co-directing Silig with Cambodian filmmaker Lomorpich Rithy. His acclaimed short Radikals screened at the 2024 Semaine de la Critique, and his latest work Agapito (2025), co-directed with Kyla Romero, was selected for the Cannes Short Film Competition.
The Rubber Tappers I រឿង៖ អ្នកចៀរជ័រ
Rotha Moeng I 2024 I
Cambodia I 20 min I Folkloric Drama I
Khmer w/ English subititles I
Philippine Premiere
In Ratanakiri, a province in the northeast of Cambodia, Khlek, an 11-year-old boy, lives on the rubber plantation where his parents work. Coming from the Kreung ethnic minority, they are tappers. But where does this huge, charred tree lying on the ground in the middle of the plantation come from? The answer that Khlek finds is much more complex than it seems.
Rotha Moeng is a Cambodian director, producer and gallery owner who works between Paris and Phnom Penh. While completing his directorial debut in Banlung, Ratanakiri, he saw two films he produced and co-produced released in Europe: The Sound of the Night by Chandaro Sok and Kong Kea Vann, and White Building, a feature by Kavich Neang. Moeng's journey reflects Cambodia's cultural revival after the Khmer Rouge era. Growing up under Pol Pot, he was cut off from art, music, and cinema—until his family fled to a refugee camp in Thailand. There, watching his first film, Poah Keng Kang, awakened a lifelong fascination with storytelling and the arts.
Olga Stalev I 2024 I
Estonia I 14:52 min I Folkloric Fantasy I Estonian w/ English subtitles I
Southeast Asian Premiere
After rejecting a lovesick Woodcutter, Dawn is kidnapped by servants of a Beast. Desperate, she releases her shadow to find help. The Shadow follows a strange bird to a forest Witch, who reveals the Beast is the cursed Woodcutter, punished for killing a bird in anger. The Witch warns Dawn will die at sunrise without her shadow. To save them both, the Shadow must enter the Beast’s dream and confront the man beneath the curse.
Stop motion director, animator, and prop maker, born in 1989. After graduating school in 2008, she began her studies in Estonian Academy of Arts, where she earned her bachelor's degree in Animation. During her study she also was an Erasmus student in FAMU, Czech republic. In 2012 she started her stop motion career at Nukufilm studio, first as prop- and puppet maker and then as animator. In early 2018 she was invited to work on “Vanamehe Film” feature project at BOP animation studio. Since 2016, Olga has been teaching stop motion animation at Estonian Academy of Arts.
The Dreamcatcher I El Atrapasueños
Guillermo Patrikios Alum I 2024 I
Spain I 12 min I Horror I
Spanish w/ English subititles I
Philippine Premiere
Juan, a boy with an overflowing imagination, writes his dreams and nightmares in notebooks but soon discovers that the monsters inhabiting his nightmares are coming to life, threatening to escape into the real world. With a growing fear that these terrifying beings will consume him, his mother, María, decides to intervene, giving him a special dreamcatcher that she used in her own childhood to lock her drawings.
Guillermo Patrikios Alum graduated in Journalism and Audiovisual Communication from Francisco de Vitoria University in 2011. In 2016, his passion for cinema led him to Los Angeles, where he earned a Master’s in Film and Television Direction at UCLA. He worked with studios like Fox Film Corporation, Spectrevision, and La Panda Producciones. His first short film, The Game, won awards at the Olympus Film Festival and WorldFest Houston. His second, The Art of Loving, was named “Best Drama Short” by the New York Film Academy. During the 2020 pandemic, he completed The Dreamcatcher. Back in Spain, he continues the family legacy through Fort Films Producciones.