QCinema Critics Lab

LETTER FROM THE COORDINATOR

Great film culture cannot exist without a great culture of criticism. For its 11th year, the QCinema International Film Festival (QCIFF) is opening its doors for the first time to eight young (under 30 years) emerging critics from all over the Philippines to participate in the inaugural QCinema Critics Lab. Motivated by a desire to expand and deepen the discourse on Filipino, Southeast Asian, and international cinema, the lab hopes to equip critics with the tools and the network to engage with evolving forms of film and media criticism.

The QCinema Critics Lab hopes to train critics who see beyond binaries of good and bad and who are interested in the gray areas, niche interests, and peripheral perspectives in cinema, and the material conditions and cultural nuances that shape our favorite and most hated works in the hopes of challenging the dominant conversations of our time. The goal of the QCinema Critics Lab is to actively support film criticism, promote coverage of non-English language and arthouse films in the Philippines, and assist talented young film critics with developing their careers as independent cultural workers with singular voices.