BAKUNAWA FEST (formerly Bakunawa Young Cinema) is the first fantastic and genre-based film, art & music festival in the Philippines and the longest-running fantastic filmfest in Southeast Asia. Bakunawa is a mythical dragon-like creature in Philippine mythology that devoured moons. Because we are a genre-bending film fest, we want to flip the Bakunawa's role and we want it to instead symbolize the creative monsters inside us.

Bakunawa Festival has an annual film camp and series of film workshops for young Filipino filmmakers that culminates into a section of our festival, producing mostly genre films (horror, sci-fi, fantasy, folk, noir, folk, etc). The films that the film camp participants produce competes in a unique section created for young filmmakers.

Bakunawa Fest loves new visions, new voices. We support young promising filmmakers, artists and musicians who either have no access to expensive workshops and may not have the name/recognition to be programmed in a festival. Since our third edition, we have included a section that screens curated local and international films - mainly for educational purposes. Most of the Bakunawa Film Camps are done as outreach programs/workshops and are hosted by different cities in the Philippines.

During the pandemic years and lockdowns from 2020-2022, we have temporarily migrated to mostly online screenings but, in 2023, we shall conduct more live screenings following health protocols. For our tenth edition, we will do a semi-hybrid festival wherein we screen more films in live venues and do a limited program online.

We also continue our partnership with SolarFlix TV wherein we show curated film programs on Philippine Primtime TV, screening to Filipino audiences all over the Philippines reaching to millions of viewers.

Visit our website at https://www.bakunawafestival.com/

This year in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are working with our partners to ensure a safe experience for our guests. Our partnering venues are all requiring the use of face masks and are practicing social distancing guidelines set forth by the CDC.

We are doubling down on our values of access, equity, inclusivity, and independence by reimagining the Global Peace Film Festival during these extraordinary times. In addition to limited public screenings, we have expanded the Festival by providing access to those unable or unwilling to travel by offering a series of “Stay-At-Home Docs” and digital Q & A Sessions that can be enjoyed in the comfort of your own home. While the COVID-19 pandemic has been a challenge, we’ve also seen it as an opportunity for creative and expansive thinking.

The Global Peace Film Festival is now a single festival expressed locally, globally, in-person and online.

The Movies that Matter Festival is a film and debate festival on human rights and social justice in The Hague, the International City of Peace and Justice. This film and debate festival is the successor of the Amnesty International Film Festival. It features the best of recent filmmaking related to human rights and human dignity and serves as a platform for debate and discussion. Beside the festival Movies that Matter organises various other human rights film events and activities including: - educational programmes at schools and film theatres - International support and promotion of human rights film screenings - a human rights film programme within the annual International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA). - Movies that Matter Tour: monthly human rights films programme in eight Dutch theatres.

FIDBA is the first International Documentary Film Festival in Argentina, a space where cinema of the real, films with the same vocation, dialogue with one another and address the diversity of forms and particular tasks that take reality as material. From this premise, the FIDBA is planned as an annual event in which they will present a selection of new directors, revisit the films of prominent authors and will recover works and films unknown to mainstream audiences.

FIDBA also aims to be a meeting place for authors to widen our perception of reality and ways of expressing it and thinking it out through film, but also the arts, new media formats and new narratives ranging from photography to instalations, from documentary theater to transmedia storytelling, not to mention the intersections between reality and fiction. The Festival is open, in short, to all documentary works that are a reflection and an effort to understand reality.

Facing a market that prevails and makes all relations a part of a great show, documentary film maintains and reaffirms its character, for making every moment and letting rule for things not easily controlled, must necessarily invent forms for always unresolved issues: the documentary is unable to reduce the world to a previous device. And though the procedures are provided, and by nature, insecure, unstable and fragile, that is exactly their strength and driving force: to be there to allow the construction of new maps and to explore over those that are not entirely known to us yet.