Ngilngig Winners 2024

From a diverse selection of 34 short films competing in the Philippine Shorts and 23 in the Asian Shorts, Ngilngig Asian Fantastic Film Festival proudly presents this year’s winners.

For a film that brings in the idea of a sensory cinema and its imaginative use of space, proposing the experience of the fantastic in the unseen and the everyday.

For using the elements of space and sound in creating a film that evokes the youthful joy of filmmaking, highlighting Asian resourcefulness and inventiveness.

This special citation is given to a visually sumptuous and skillfully-crafted with rich narrative tackling multi-layered issues concerning anthropology, colonial mentality, lookism, and the Asian reality of migration.

This special citation is given to a film that highlights the festival’s theme in its harrowing depiction of animalistic desire, longing, isolation, and human transformation.

A meticulously crafted, emotionally moving allegory that excels in and uses its economy in storytelling to reimagine horror and the fantastic through the lens of folklore, revealing the director’s keen understanding of the contradictions of culture, loss of identity, and the clash of modernity and tradition.

The film’s skillful melange of different genres and contemporary aesthetics is both playful in its depiction of a coming-of-age story and serious in tackling the horrors of historical revisionism and apathy. It’s crazy, radical, non-conformist, but also extremely fun.

This special citation is given to a film’s ensemble acting, pulling off the portrayal of a multi-character narrative, where over-the-top theatrics and physical comedy contrast but work within the fabric of the film’s absurdities and satirical take on death and family dysfunction.