Backroom × Kinoise

Sam Manacsa

Sam Manacsa is a Manila-based filmmaker and production designer with a Film degree from the University of the Philippines. An Asian Film Academy alumnus and Berlinale Talents participant, her short Cross My Heart and Hope to Die (2023) premiered in the official Orizzonti Short Films Competition at the 80th Venice Film Festival — the only Southeast Asian entry that year — and went on to win Best Short Film and Best Director (Short Film) at Cinemalaya 2024. Her earlier shorts include I Wanted to Say Hello so I wrote a Song (2015) and If People Such as We Cease to Exist (2016, in competition at Clermont-Ferrand). Outside her own directing she works freelance as a production designer, with credits across films by Carlo Francisco Manatad, Petersen Vargas, and Martika Ramirez Escobar.

Shireen Seno

Shireen Seno (b. 1983, Japan) is a Filipino visual artist and filmmaker whose work addresses memory, history, and image-making — often in relation to the idea of home. She studied architecture and cinema at the University of Toronto and taught in Japan before relocating to Manila, where she began as a stills photographer for filmmakers Lav Diaz and John Torres. With Torres she co-founded Los Otros, a Manila-based studio, film laboratory, library, and live-events platform. Her features Big Boy and Nervous Translation both premiered at IFFR Rotterdam, with Nervous Translation winning the NETPAC award for Best Asian Film and going on to screenings at Tate Modern and MoMA. She received the 2018 Thirteen Artists Award from the Cultural Center of the Philippines. Shotgun Tuding (2014) is her 13-minute homage to the Pancit Western — the Filipino counterpart of the Spaghetti Western — about a young woman arriving in town with a shotgun, hunting for the man who got her sister pregnant.

Alejo Barbaza & Mervine Aquino

Alejo Barbaza and Mervine Aquino are filmmakers and graduates of the University of the Philippines Film Institute. Aquino is from Baguio City; his practice gravitates toward entanglements of memory, histories, spaces, and dreams, with recent personal and collective work grounded in labor-rights advocacy. Barbaza’s interests run through scriptwriting and sound. Their joint short SPID (2019) premiered in QCShorts at QCinema with a ₱200,000 production grant; in it, an epidemic delays sight from sound, and a retiring hitman takes on one last job — eliminate the city’s biggest supplier of “spid,” a drug that syncs the two back together. Aquino’s other shorts include Baguio Address No. 10 (2018) and Palengke Day (2022); he is a Prince Claus Fund awardee.

Gerard Bernardo

Gerard Bernardo is a Filipino filmmaker working in experimental form. Buwal na mga Imahe (Dead Images) is his rapid-fire, manipulated short on the distortion and decay of memory and culture, built from layered sound and picture.

Dodo Dayao

Eduardo “Dodo” Dayao is a film critic and writer turned filmmaker, and a fixture of Manila’s independent horror cinema. He co-edited the book This Is Not A Film Movement and ran the now-inactive blog Piling Piling Pelikula; his criticism has appeared in Esquire, ANC, CNN, Philippine Free Press, Cinematheque Quarterly, Pelikula Journal, and Kinopunch, among others. He moved into screenwriting in 2010 and directing in 2014. His debut feature Violator (2014) won Best Film at Cinema One Originals; his follow-up Midnight in a Perfect World (2020) is a supernatural horror set in a superficially utopian near-future Manila, which won Best Direction Gold at the 28th FACINE Filipino International Cine Festival. Uninvited arrived in 2024.

Artist Bios

Sam Manacsa

Shireen Seno

Alejo Barbaza & Mervine Aquino

Gerard Bernardo

Dodo Dayao

Trailers

Links

Documentation