Timmy Harn
Timmy Harn is a Filipino filmmaker, production designer, and art director whose work moves between genre, regional folklore, and outright hallucination. He first drew international attention as one half of Tito & Tito (with Gym Lumbera), whose short Class Picture screened in the New Waves program at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival and won Best Experimental Film at the 2011 Gawad CCP Short Film Festival.
His debut feature, Reptilia in Suburbia (2013) — original title Ang Pagbabalat ng Ahas — earned him Best Director and Best Screenplay nominations in the Cinema One Currents section of the Cinema One Originals Digital Film Festival. The film is a side-eyed tribute to the cinema of the 90s, set in a walled-in subdivision and following one family as they love, fight, and hunt for snakes.
He returned in 2018 with Dog Days, his most widely circulated film to date — a black-and-white sports melodrama about a teenager named Michael Jordan Ulili, gifted with supernatural basketball ability through his mother’s blood sacrifice, whose dream collapses through racism, injury, and crystal meth. The film won the NETPAC Jury Prize at the QCinema International Film Festival, then had its international premiere at IFFR Rotterdam in 2019, where it screened in the Bright Future section. In the festival’s own framing, Dog Days reads as an allegory of the Philippines as a mix of indigenous roots, former-colonial culture, and the pull of an American promised land — recorded in a register that slides from sports film into melodrama into narcotic nightmare, with an Oedipal lead role for a Mitsubishi Galant.
