QCShorts International 2 Highlights Stories of Resistance and Resilience in 2025 Film Program

The 2025 edition of the QCINEMA International Film Festival presents an expanded shorts program with 26 films across five sections. The QCShorts International 2 segment, titled "The Center Cannot Hold," draws inspiration from Elyn Saks’ memoir and W.B. Yeats’ poetry, focusing on stories that explore the fractures and acts of resistance within families, communities, and wider societies.

This program showcases five distinctive films that offer a mixture of poetic, personal, and socially charged narratives, many set in Southeast Asia, illuminating underrepresented voices and landscapes.

The lineup opens with Don Eblahan’s "VOX HUMANA," a contemplative piece blending natural imagery with evocative sounds, highlighting the relationship between humans and their environment through the lens of indigenous presence and scientific observation. Eblahan’s work, fresh from the Toronto International Film Festival, invites viewers to engage deeply with the tension between authority and indigenous power.

Beny Kristia’s "WHEN THE BLUES GOES MARCHING IN" is a personal documentary rooted in Indonesia’s history of activism. Featuring a son’s dream conveyed to his father and illustrated with cyanotype photographs, the film captures the enduring spirit of protest and the complex emotions tied to national memory. Kristia’s straightforward approach makes this work a heartfelt tribute to resistance and hope.

Lin Htet Aung’s "A METAMORPHOSIS" adopts a lo-fi aesthetic mimicking Myanmar’s state TV propaganda to expose subtle yet potent forms of dissent amid dictatorship. Combining unsettling digital distortions with a traditional lullaby, the film reveals the uneasy spaces forged by repression, innovatively pushing back against nationalist media narratives.

Norvin de los Santos’ "HOY, HOY, INGAT!," supported by a QCShorts 2025 grant, offers a warmly human narrative about two siblings navigating life’s hardships in Manila’s urban poor communities. Through a playful and empathetic lens, it chronicles their escape aboard a battered family jeepney, highlighting stories that are rarely told with such tenderness amid the city’s relentless development pressures.

Rounding out the program, "SI KARA: ANG BABAYE NGA NAG DABA-DABA" by Dale, another grant recipient, blends absurdist comedy with social commentary set in Bacolod. The film satirizes escalating environmental and societal crises through surreal imagery and humor, portraying toxic pollution and rising temperatures as metaphors for contemporary challenges faced by Filipinos.

QCShorts International 2 will be screened on November 21 at Fisher Mall at 3:45 p.m. and Gateway 2 at 9:20 p.m., promising audiences an immersive exploration of resilience and resistance across diverse cultural contexts.