The German Film Festival, also known as KinoFest will kick off on October 16, 2025 at the Red Carpet Cinema of the Shangri-La Plaza in Mandaluyong City.
This year’s festival showcases eight (8) contemporary German films and five (5) Filipino short films, three (2) of them stories from the Visayas, fostering a vibrant exchange between two dynamic cinema cultures. The selections revolve around themes of memory, reimagining, and the confrontation of perspectives, while also exploring family, belonging, and care. Together, they invite audiences to reflect on personal ties, collective histories, and the power of cinema to connect communities across borders.
A special highlight of the Manila program is KinoFest Special: Stories Across Continents on October 18, 2025, which brings together two Filipino short films set in the Visayas engaging with climate change. These works imagine the climate crisis not only as an ecological challenge but also as a lived reality interwoven with love, myth, displacement, and grief. After the screenings, writer and transfeminist artist Jaya Jacobo will moderate a discussion with the filmmakers, including Krystahl Guina and Miko Reyes (“Baradiya”) and Carl Joseph Lara (“Rumbles of the Earth”).
“Baradiya” (2025) in Binukid, Bisaya, is about a young Filipino indigenous trans woman facing her destiny and her spiritual past amid the discrimination and destruction of her ancestral land in the Philippines while “Rumbles of the Earth” (2024) in Cebuano is about mysterious disappearances of people rise as earthquakes shake Mindanao. 13-year-old Munya investigates the strange phenomenon after her mother goes missing during a solar eclipse. Fantasy and reality blur as the mythical serpent dragon “Bakunawa," devours a seemingly tranquil world.
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