Cinemata

23/09/2026

How Can Film Change the Stories We Tell?

What happens when a film platform becomes more than a place to watch films?

In this interview with Jen Tarnate, Cinemata’s Project Lead, The Narrative Space sits down with her to explore how Cinemata uses film, technology, and community to make space for stories that are often overlooked. The conversation looks at the platform’s journey, its work with filmmakers and communities across the Asia-Pacific, and the possibilities of using film circulation as part of a wider practice of narrative change.

The conversation also touches on an idea that sits close to Cinemata’s work: films don’t simply tell stories—they can shape how we understand the world, whose experiences we notice, and what we imagine is possible. The Narrative Space describes narrative as a collection of stories that shapes what we see, value, and consider possible, while highlighting the role of alternative narratives in widening those possibilities.

Read the full sit-down with Jen Tarnate on The Narrative Space.

Read the interview → https://the-narrative-space.org/cinemata/

23/09/2026

22/09/2026

What keeps human rights cinema alive?

Our own King Catoy spent five days in Jakarta at the 100% Manusia Film Festival, joining filmmakers, programmers, and human rights film organisers from across Southeast Asia through Movies that Matter’s Cinema without Borders programme.

In his field notes, King reflects on what happens when people working in human rights cinema come together—not simply to screen films, but to exchange practices, think through the challenges of sustaining festivals, and build the networks that allow this work to continue.

From community screenings and fringe events to funding, advocacy, and the question of where films go after their festival run, his reflections offer a closer look at the people keeping human rights cinema moving across the region.

And perhaps the question at the heart of it all: what does it take to keep making space for these films—and for the people whose stories they carry?

Read King’s full reflection, “HR Films in Good Hands: Five Days at the 100% Manusia Film Festival,” published by Movies that Matter.

Read the article on Movies that Matter: https://moviesthatmatter.nl/en/magazine/hr-films-in-good-hands-five-days-at-the-100-manusia-film-festival/

22/09/2026

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐂𝐮𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐨𝐫'𝐬 𝐅𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐅𝐢𝐥𝐦 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐝𝐚𝐲 𝐢𝐬 𝐩𝐢𝐜𝐤𝐞𝐝 𝐛𝐲 Roland Cartagena ()

The locomotive blurs into cinema in this silent work shot while in transit on a train. From a passenger’s vantage looking out into the open, the flurry of images happening upon the lens coalesces into abstract motion, recalling a film strip leader that flashes rapidly past at the start of analog film screenings. As the program’s closing film, Track Projections punctuates with artless yet perceptive imagery, affording viewers a liminal space to breathe for what comes next: the return to reality, a break from spectatorship, and working back through the journey of the film program itself that had become a train ride of its own.

Track Projections by Raya Martin screens as part of Co-Opted Agit-Train: This Program Is an Ideological Engine, a curated set of films that hold up a mirror to the geopolitical turbulence of the times.

Watch for free: https://cinemata.org/view?m=Jfs6arHnb

21/09/2026

Reimagining truth beyond the familiar.

As part of a series revisiting Gawad Alternatibo’s past winners, Cinemata community curator Christ Dustly Go Tan presents selected films from the Experimental Category alongside conversations with their filmmakers.

For this selection, we look back at award-winning experimental films and how they break from convention to explore contemporary anxieties, challenge familiar ways of seeing, and turn the abstract into new forms of meaning-making.

From the voids of memory and the persistence of apathy, to plastic pollution and environmental crisis, to histories of violence and struggle that continue to shape the present, these films use unconventional forms to create visceral ways of confronting realities that resist easy representation.

Watch the Gawad Alternatibo Experimental Retrospective on Cinemata.

https://cinemata.org/voices-gawadalt-retro-experimental

21/09/2026

What remains when histories disappear?

The next programme from the Cinemata Community Curators Residency Batch 4 is beginning its journey this October.

Curated by Vietnamese curator Tran Khánh An, Bodies, Places, & Inscriptions of Their Traces brings together films that move through memory, disappearance, displacement, and the traces left on bodies and places.

The programme will travel across Vietnam, with screenings beginning October 3, before continuing online from October 5. The programme will also make its way to audiences in the Philippines later in October.

More details, screening schedules, and programme information will be announced soon.

Follow the traces.

17/09/2026

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐂𝐮𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐨𝐫'𝐬 𝐅𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐅𝐢𝐥𝐦 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐝𝐚𝐲 𝐢𝐬 𝐩𝐢𝐜𝐤𝐞𝐝 b𝐲 Roland Cartagena ( )

Predating his more prominent career as a cinematographer, Neil Daza not only shot but also directed Unos, a joint production between the National Commission for Culture and the Arts and Mowelfund, both established institutions with lineages in the development of Philippine cinema. Unos would later be selected under the experimental category of Gawad Alternatibo, a Philippine annual film competition, specifically for its 9th edition in 1995. The film channels the zeitgeist shaped by the heady political upheavals of the country’s post-Martial Law era, evidently drawing from the militant years before it to construct and inform the film’s dark and unsettling diegesis. Told through the storyline of a child too young to fully grasp the machinations of the State, Unos renders Martial Law not as history but as felt experience, with cryptic images of loss arriving before understanding does.

Burning Storm by screens as part of Co-Opted Agit-Train: This Program Is an Ideological Engine, a curated set of films that hold up a mirror to the geopolitical turbulence of the times.

Watch the film for free: https://cinemata.org/view?m=UePmCSJV0

15/09/2026

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐂𝐮𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐨𝐫'𝐬 𝐅𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐅𝐢𝐥𝐦 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐝𝐚𝐲 𝐢𝐬 𝐩𝐢𝐜𝐤𝐞𝐝 𝐛𝐲 Roland Cartagena ()

There is no denying that Antithesis’ monochromatic Our Denial seeks to convey an institutional critique in the contexts of racism, censorship, and the educational system in Singapore. Artist Seelan Palay, who served as the director of the film, is himself no stranger to dissent, whose transgressive oeuvre includes his own arrest by authorities as part of an incisive performance in 2017. Together with Antithesis’ Cher Tan and Nessi Esteffa, Our Denial was made with solidarity in mind. In their own words: “We want to tell any frustrated Singaporean who understands what’s going on around them, and yet feels helpless and trapped, that they’re not alone.” The film thus locates itself in a continuum of works that intend to lay bare what has been denied to Singaporeans, and the cheeky “All rights denied” subversion at the end credits should tell you as much.

Our Denial by Antithesis screens as part of Co-Opted Agit-Train: This Program Is an Ideological Engine, a curated set of films that hold up a mirror to the geopolitical turbulence of the times.

Watch the film for free: https://cinemata.org/view?m=wUSiorbG

14/09/2026

When reality refuses to stay in the frame.

As part of a series revisiting Gawad Alternatibo’s past winners, Cinemata community curator Christ Dustly Go Tan presents selected films from each category alongside conversations with their filmmakers.

For this selection, we look back at award-winning documentary films and how they can become a space for uncovering personal stories, preserving memory, and confronting political and social realities.

From environmental struggles and disappearing livelihoods to family histories, collective memory, and the realities of communities, these films remind us that documentary can do more than record what is happening—it can make us look closer at the realities we share.

Watch the Gawad Alternatibo Documentary Retrospective on Cinemata.

https://cinemata.org/voices-gawadalt-retro-documentary

12/09/2026

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐂𝐮𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐨𝐫'𝐬 𝐅𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐅𝐢𝐥𝐦 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐝𝐚𝐲 𝐢𝐬 𝐩𝐢𝐜𝐤𝐞𝐝 𝐛𝐲 Roland Cartagena ( )

From Kanji texts highlighting certain words (“country,” “war,” “human,” etc.) to faces of people, almanacs, floor plans, and board games—thousands of individual stills fashioned from newspaper clippings compose Satō’s collage animation, whose durational brevity belies its succinct encapsulation of expansive cycles and sweeping movements, set to the ostinatos of a pulsating score, Steve Reich’s Different Trains. Satō derives from features of a newspaper a synecdoche for the rhythm, bustle, and briskness of life, where paper assumes a prominent point of contact in human productivity in the 1990s before print media’s later decline. Through the idiosyncrasy of animation, PAPERS visualizes the sharedness and redundancy of information, a condition that remains relevant if not more pertinent in today’s digital and data-obsessed era.

PAPERS by Yoshinao Satō screens as part of Co-Opted Agit-Train: This Program Is an Ideological Engine, a curated set of films that hold up a mirror to the geopolitical turbulence of the times.

Watch the film here: https://cinemata.org/view?m=24hAPh1HO