Films from the Living Room screening

This screening will focus on the work of Filipino filmmaker John Torres, featuring two selections from his extensive filmography: “We Still Have to Close Our Eyes” (13 minutes) and “Room in a Crowd” (42 minutes). The event will include an introduction and discussion with John Torres, Shireen Seno, Lai Weijie, and Lawrence Garcia. All are welcome. Registration at uoft.me/TheLivingRoom.

About the speakers:

John Torres is an independent filmmaker, musician and writer, known for his highly personal and poetic style. He co-runs Los Otros, a Manila-based space, film lab, and platform committed to the intersections of film and art, with a focus on process over product. His work fictionalizes and reworks personal and found documentations of love, family relations, and memory in relation to current events, hearsays, myth, and folklore. Weaving together archival clips, found footage, and visually powerful imagery, his films unfold narrative structures, often with strong autobiographical references, that defy conventional tropes and genres.

Shireen Seno is an artist and filmmaker whose work addresses memory, history, and image-making, often in relation to the idea of home. A recipient of the 2018 Thirteen Artists Award from the Cultural Center of the Philippines, she is known for her films which have won awards at Rotterdam, Punto de Vista, Shanghai, Olhar de Cinema, Vladivostok, Jogja-Netpac, and Lima Independiente and have screened at numerous international festivals and art institutions. Seno was a 2022 Film Fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin program and 2023 Visiting Professor for ArteVisione at c/o in Milan. Her first solo exhibition in Europe, "A child dies, a child plays, a woman is born, a woman dies, a bird arrives, a bird flies off," at daadgalerie in Berlin in 2023, travelled to Esplanade - Theatres By the Bay in Singapore in 2024. Her work is in the collections of Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts and Asia-Pacific Photobook Archive. Seno graduated with a major in Architectural Studies in 2005.

Lai Weijie is a film producer based in Singapore and Toronto, Canada. In 2010 he co-founded E&W Films, a Singapore-based film development and production company with Elizabeth Wijaya. Weijie has several years of experience as a senior programmer at the Singapore International Film Festival, developing its film academy and overseeing its Asian selection. He has served on the selection committee for several funding bodies.

Lawrence Garcia is a PhD student at the University of Toronto's Cinema Studies Institute.