These are six films you shouldn’t miss at the QCinema International Film Festival, which will take place online from November 27th until December 6th, 2020.

The festival’s online screening will be released nationwide through UPSTREAM, the newly launched online Transactional Video on Demand (TVOD) streaming platform. Tickets may be purchased from the country’s largest aggregator for online cinema ticketing, GMovies.

Recommended Films:

The protagonist is a saleslady in a local department store. Her everyday life is composed of an exhausting commute home. She deals with the manager who always seems to have something to say about her physical state; her co-worker, Ted who is obviously interested in her but can’t take a hint; and from the catcallers near where she lives. When she finally gets home, there’s no one there but her roommate who couldn’t care less about her. All that is about to change when she reaches the gate to her boarding house and finds a peculiar looking gun right on her doorstep. Suddenly, she can do anything she wants, talk back to whoever she wants, and even hurt anyone she wants. (QCinema)

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Cleaners is a coming-of-age anthology film about high school classroom cleaners for the school year 2007-2008. Set in the backdrop of a Catholic school in Tuguegarao City, the characters deal with different pressures of being clean, proper and pure while slowly discovering that the world is dirty and superficial to begin with. The different stories range from the taboo of shitting in school to navigating local political dynasties. (QCinema)

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In the summer of 1991, Paolo, a 13-year-old boy with an overprotective mother, cannot play video games any more due to a nationwide blackout following a series of earthquakes. He and his friends wandering the streets with nothing to do, are beaten by the US military and decide to circumcise to prove that they are grown up too. To spend time with a girl in the neighborhood that he is fond of, he plans on going to a ghost-catching trip despite the opposition of his mother. Director Raya Martin’s previous shorts and feature films have been invited to prestige festivals such as Cannes and won awards. His latest feature film Death of Nintendo has a very personal touch, yet contains social messages. (Park Sungho)

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The island of Hugaw is rife with dark myths and strange histories. In one legend, sightings of a black horse bring certain death; in another, the miasmatic fear that clouds the island is a colonial leftover that blights the land and scars the people. Darker still are the hearts of mankind, whose greed and penchant for violence one character likens to the genus Pan, or chimpanzees, humanity’s closest biological kin.

An allegory on the monsters that deprivation and avarice make of men, set against contemporary Philippines’ violent, traumatic history, Genus Pan is a bleak examination of the inescapable fate of the underclass who remains trapped in an endless cycle of violence. The film won Best Director in the Orizzonti section at Venice. (SGIFF 2020)

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Sonya is an old maid stuck in a town that long ceased to recognize her existence but only until one fateful morning when a mysterious corpse arrives at the footsteps of their family owned funeral shop. Bringing forth strange luck and fortune, Sonya instantly gets drawn to the corpse’s mystique, reinvigorating not only her life but also that of her father Mang Rudy. But luck would eventually dry up, provoking further distress back to Sonya’s life. She faces the reality that her existence is nothing more that of the corpse, at the tail end of its mortality staring life wither away.

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When a long painful fertility treatment failed, Satoko and her husband Kiyokazu chose to adopt. Six years after adopting a boy who they named Asato, Satoko is living a peaceful life with her family. But one day, a woman called Hikari phones Satoko, asking Satoko to give her son back to her. Hikari is Asato’s birth mother who Satoko met six years ago. She was 14 years old back then, but when Hikari visits Satoko, Satoko instinctively feels that she is not Hikari. Who is she then? When Hikari’s shocking past is revealed, what will Satoko do? (TGHFF 2020)

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For more information about the festival and the programme please visit the official website here: https://www.facebook.com/QCinemaPH