The Kinofest Special gathers
five short films that imagine climate change not only as crisis but as lived texture—woven into love, myth, displacement, and grief. These works approach the environment as more than backdrop: it becomes an archive of memory, a contested inheritance, and a terrain where survival and storytelling are inseparable.
We begin with
Whammy Alcazaren’s Water Sport (2024), where politics and water security spill into intimacy. Climate change emerges not as abstract, but as desire itself—bodies enduring amid El Niño’s parched aftermath. From here,
Austin Tan’s Ngatta Naddaki y Nuang?(2022) turns toward searching, where migration and flooding intertwine with grief. A search for a carabao echoes a search for memory in a landscape scarred by loss.
Suspense deepens in
Juvy Ann Clarito’s Sa Ilalum Sa Balabal Sa Alitaptap (2024), where ecological justice is bound to land and kinship. A girl’s resistance to a land-grabber unfolds with a quiet act of witness. While in
Carl Joseph Lara’s Rumbles of the Earth (2024), where earthquakes and disappearances blur fantasy and reality, a child’s search for her mother evokes both political erasure and environmental upheaval.
We close with
Gab Mejia’s Baradiya (2025), where a Talaandig-Manobo trans woman called to become Babaylan affirms continuity amid the destruction of ancestral lands, as tradition, gender, and ecology converge in remembering and becoming.
Together, these films stage conversations across satire and myth, grief and resistance, intimacy and history. The Kinofest Special invites us to see climate change not as a single disaster, but as an ongoing negotiation of identity, place, and possibility—where cinema itself becomes a form of witness.
