Los Otros: John Torres & Shireen Seno
The first major UK retrospective of filmmakers Shireen Seno and John Torres, whose studio, film laboratory, library and platform Los Otros is one of the most invigorating forces in Philippine cinema today.
Feature
Big Boy
Big Boy is Shireen Seno’s first feature film. Shot on Super 8 film, it tells the story of Julio and the business venture initiated by his parents. Julio’s parents wish him to become an ideal man according to their standards: to be tall like an American. Everything seems to work out fine, until one day Julio stops growing. Big Boy chronicles the growth of a family, the myths of progress that consume them, and the inherent violence in war, colonisation and coming into being.
Q&A with filmmaker Shireen Seno
Feature
Lukas the Strange
Lukas the Strange is surreal, dreamlike and wonderfully bizarre. Reality and cinematic fiction blur when a film crew comes to young Lukas’ town. With a strange and often mythological narrative, where memories are traded for bodily scars and people can become statues, the film touches on personal identity, complicated familial relationships and the slippage of memory.
Q&A with filmmaker John Torres
Feature
Years When I Was a Child Outside
Years When I Was a Child Outside is a meta-film following Torres’ perspective as the son of best-selling self-help author Rodolfo Torres, whose instructional books and tapes made in early 1980s Philippines aimed to ‘help raise brighter children’. Upon learning of his father’s secret family, the narrator embarks on a quest to create order from this chaos.
Q&A with filmmaker John Torres
