Director: John TORRES

John Torres has the sensibility of a romantic poet, themode of address of a personal essayist, and ananthropologist's curious, lingering, critical eye."—Cinema ScopeJOHN TORRES (b. 1975) is an independent filmmaker, musician,and writer, known for his highly personal and poetic style.His work fictionalizes and reworks personal and founddocumentations of love, family relations, and memory in relationto current events, hearsay, myth, and folklore. Weaving togetherarchival clips, found footage, and visually powerful imagery, hisfilms unfold narrative structures, often with strongautobiographical references, that defy conventional tropes andgenres.John emerged alongside a generation of friends and collaboratorsthat included Lav Diaz, Khavn De La Cruz, and Raya Martin, part ofwhat the Harvard Film Archive has called a "veritable Filipino NewWave."In 2006, he was awarded the Dragons & Tigers Award for YoungCinema at the 25th Vancouver International Film Festival for hisdebut feature, Todo Todo Teros, with a jury that includedfilmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul. That connectioncontinued in 2025 at Apichatpong's Bangkok Experimental FilmFestival, where John presented the film-performance version ofRoom in a Crowd, commissioned by the Mike Kelley Foundationfor the Arts through Los Angeles Filmforum. John has made six features and more than a dozen short filmsincluding, The Remotes (2006), his narrative feature debut.He was a featured artist at The Flaherty Seminar in 2018,invited by that year's curators Kevin Jerome Everson and Gregde Cuir Jr., and an artist-in-residence at the NTU Centre forContemporary Art (NTU CCA) Singapore in 2019.In 2024, he returned to Toronto as Filmmaker-in-Residence atthe University of Toronto, where he delivered the artist talk"Parasitical Filmmaking Strategies (Or, How FamilialRelationships Influence Our Filmmaking)."Together with Shireen Seno of Los Otros, a Manila-basedplatform for the intersections of film and art, John is therecipient of the 2025 Han Nefkens Foundation, Mori ArtMuseum, M+ and Singapore Art Museum – Moving ImageCommission.A special focus of John's works was shown in Oberhausen in2024 and at the Viennale in 2013. In 2018, Berwick Film & MediaArts Festival gave John and Shireen their first major UKretrospective, alongside a seminar the two co-led on Los Otros'history, community, and working methods.