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QCShorts 2025 Selection Committee

Meet the 2025 QCShorts Selection Committee

QCShorts Production Grant aims to champion singular filmmaking voices who seek to explore rich, emotionally resonant, and uniquely Filipino stories that can only be told through the short film format. This year’s grant, increased to P500,000, underscores QCinema’s dedication to nurturing local filmmaking talent. The projects were selected after a two-month review process and three rounds of screening by a six-person selection committee of cinema experts, film critics, and accomplished filmmakers.

The selection committee includes QCinema festival director Ed Lejano and programmers Kristine Kintana and Jason Tan Liwag. The members this year are:

Ed Lejano is the artistic director of the QCinema International Film Festival and one of the board members of the QCinema Film Foundation. He is currently a board member and head of grievances of the Directors’ Guild of the Philippines, and co-vice president of NETPAC, through which he has been a jury member in various international film festivals including Busan, Vesoul, Rotterdam, Tallinn, Singapore, and Venice, among others. He completed a Master’s degree in Broadcast Communication in UP Diliman, and a diploma course in Filmmaking from New York University. He was formerly senior faculty of the University of the Philippines Film Institute (UPFI), where he taught screenwriting and directing in both undergraduate and graduate levels. He has contributed film articles to various local publications as well as to Screen International.

Kristine Kintana is a Filipino producer, production manager, translator, actress, and film programmer. As a collaborator of Khavn, Lav Diaz, Roxlee, and Monster Jimenez, films that she has been part of have won awards in Venice, Locarno, and Berlin, and has been shown in festivals and retrospectives all over the world. She is one of the founding members of the Active Vista Human Rights Festival and part of the Board of Directors for the QC Film Foundation. Since 2014, she has been part of the selection committee of QCinema International Film Festival for short film and feature film grants..

Jason Tan Liwag is a scientist, actor, writer, curator, and educator. An alumnus of film criticism programs in Manila, Rotterdam, Udine, and Yamagata, he founded the QCinema Critics Lab—a continuing education program for Filipino film critics. He has served on selection committees and juries of festivals in Manila, Taipei, Bristol, San Diego, Dhaka, and Singapore, and was most recently a guest curator for Queer East 2024. Presently, he heads short film programming at QCinema and is a shorts programmer at the Leeds International Film Festival. A three-time international voter for the Golden Globes and the first FIPRESCI member from the Philippines, his writing has appeared in Filmmaker Magazine, MUBI Notebook, Little White Lies, Screen Slate, Rolling Stone Philippines, Vogue Philippines, and among others.

John Lloyd Cruz is a producer, actor, and self-taught moving image artist. With over two decades in film and television, John Lloyd is described as one of the most influential and most awarded actors in contemporary Philippine cinema. Defined as the “quintessential leading man” by CNN Philippines, he has successfully created a career in both commercial and independent films and is most known for his long-standing collaborations with directors such as Cathy Garcia-Sampana and Lav Diaz. For his contributions to cinema in the 2010s, he was given the Natatanging Aktor ng Dekada by the Manunuri ng Pelikulang Pilipino in 2021. In 2023, he won the Boccalino d’Oro prize for Best Actor at the 76th Locarno Film Festival for his eighth collaboration with Lav Diaz—Essential Truths of the Lake. As a moving image artist, his works have been exhibited in West Gallery, Underground Gallery, Galerie Stephanie, Art Informal, and the Cultural Center of the Philippines.

Maria Estela Paiso has been in post-production since 2016 and has also been making hiphop music videos under the alias metromaria. In 2021, she forayed into directing with her short film It’s Raining Frogs Outside. Her most recent short, Objects Do Not Randomly Fall From The Sky is about the fisherfolk in Masinloc and their experience of China’s territorial aggression in the West Philippine Sea. In her free time, she tries to get a 100 at karaoke.

Sam Manacsa is a Filipino filmmaker and production designer born in Manila. After graduating with a degree in Film from the University of the Philippines Diliman, she worked as an art director on award-winning films such as Carlo Francisco Manatad’s Whether the Weather Is Fine (Kun Maupay Man It Panahon), among others. Her thesis film If People Such as We Cease to Exist (Kung Wala Nang Tulad Natin) was selected for the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival in 2017. In 2019, Sam was selected as one of the fellows for the Asian Film Academy. She is also an alumna of the SEAFIC Seed Lab 2022. Her sophomore short film Cross My Heart and Hope to Die had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in the Orizzonti Section and has since won several awards from Oscar-qualifying festivals, including the grand prize at PÖFF Shorts and Regard-Saguenay International Short Film Festival.