‘Cinemata Features’ is a series highlighting film practitioners in the Asia-Pacific – filmmakers, film groups, curators, critics, and archivists – who create and disseminate social and environmental issue films in the region.
In this ninth feature, Cinemata highlights the work of Patrick F. Campos, a film scholar, programmer, and critic from the Philippines. An associate professor at the University of the Philippines Film Institute, his work explores the intersections of politics, aesthetics, and regional cinema in the Philippines and Southeast Asia. He has been involved in programming, curating, jury work, and selection committees for a wide range of film festivals, art institutions, and advocacy organizations across Asia and beyond on local, national, and international scales. He is also the author of The End of National Cinema, editor of Pelikula: A Journal of Philippine Cinema and Moving Image, and programmer of the Tingin Southeast Asian Film Festival.
Patrick is also part of the first batch of the Cinemata Community Curator Residency Program, which supports curators from the Asia-Pacific in organizing film programs that address pressing social and environmental issues. The residency aims to strengthen regional solidarity, expand access to underrepresented works, and reimagine film curation as a tool for civic engagement.
EngageMedia [EM]: Your work spans film programming, criticism, and education. How did your journey across these fields begin, and what drew you to focus on Southeast Asian and Philippine cinema?
Patrick Campos [PC]: Looking back, one might be tempted to read my career trajectory as seamless—a string of linked choices across fields that speak to one another: a training in filmmaking, then in literary and cinema studies, and now, a crisscrossing of research, pedagogy, and cultural work. But this neat mapping belies a much more ambivalent set of turns—born of both disenchantment and, in strange measure, fortuitous alignments.
When I forayed into the film industry, it was on the cusp of digital’s full arrival. The promises of cinematic storytelling were still tethered to analog precarity, and what I encountered was less the romance of creative work than the machinery of labor exploitation—inhuman, even then, and certainly not unfamiliar now. (A three-day, multiple-location, continuous shoot was what did it for me.) My anger ran ahead of me, faster than I could gain footing, and I was burned out even before I started in earnest.
The university became a place to regroup. I returned carrying not only exhaustion but questions—about the very structure of this thing we call “Philippine cinema,” and why so much of its labor remains unexamined, its histories scattered and undertheorized. It was startling to realize how few scholars were grappling with the field, even until today as the number of aspiring filmmakers has multiplied, and how this dearth shaped the kind of discourse that could take root: original, yes, and I am always grateful for those who came before me, but also fragile in its paradigmatic limitation.
What I’ve attempted since—through writing The End of National Cinema and Scenes Reclaimed and editing Pelikula—has been both about filling gaps and unsettling foundations: probing how the narratives of national cinema are assembled, where my inquiries might sit within them, and how we might begin to foster a more capacious, critical, and regionally attuned conversation. When I took on reviving Pelikula, it was with the same stubborn hope: that by stitching together more voices, we might weave a more vivid and vaster tapestry.
Along this uneven road, what has sustained me most is not a singular vision informed by clear decisions, but the ongoing exchange—with colleagues across Southeast Asia who, in navigating their own cinematic terrains, have modeled what it means to write from within constraint, and yet toward community. Their projects mirrored mine in ethos: the fight against institutional forgetting, the quiet labor of recovery, the unglamorous work of insisting some stories are worth retelling, forms championing, and causes advocating. Organically, I began to be interested in what they were doing and began to look inward from a more comparative vantage point.
So, what began as a retreat from filmmaking became, unexpectedly, a deeper engagement with all its unfinished possibilities. The industry I left still runs on exploitation; the histories I study remain half-written. But in the gaps between, I found some work to do.
EM: You’ve written about the need for alternative ways of seeing and narrating Philippine cinema as “national” cinema. Why is it important to challenge dominant narratives, and how do you personally approach this?
PC: The impulse to contest dominant narratives feels like the most obvious starting point—urgent, self-evident. These narratives—engineered myths like the [Philippines’] Martial Law “golden years” under dictator Marcos Sr., or the dehumanizing script that casts drug users as disposable under the strongman “fatherhood” of [former Philippine president] Duterte—are not just distortions. In these examples, we can see how dominant narratives seduce, polarize, render complexity untenable. They summon entire communities as either devotees or enemies in their binary universe, while disregarding or erasing a host of other narratives.
And yet, what continues to disturb me is how quickly resistance itself can ossify into its own binaries. The temptation to draft a counter-narrative of equal scale and force—to meet myth with myth—is strong. But I’ve learned that it is often within these oppositional impulses that nuance falters. To think from the inside—inside a nation, a discourse, a discipline—is to be caught in sedimented language, inherited convictions. And yet, it is precisely here, inside, where the slow work of critical reckoning must take place. This is where reflexive national thinking is crucial.
But this is also where regional thinking becomes my compass—not to locate myself from nowhere, but simultaneously from the inside and the outside of nation. This simultaneity is at once about “cold” distance and “warm” proximity. What I now identify as my regional practice has taught me the importance of thinking beside (after Trinh T. Minh-ha) rather than always and only against.
What happens when we look toward neighboring contexts—for example, Indonesia’s navigation of post-authoritarian memory that resembles ours so closely, Myanmar’s endless power grabs and civil wars, Malaysia’s minority and indigenous struggles, Singapore’s social engineering in the name of progress, Cambodia’s tragic history of genocidal purges, and so on—not as blueprints, but as subjunctive possibilities and ghostly warnings? What kinds of futures surface when we engage with histories that are not quite ours, but familiar enough to haunt our own?
I’m used to slow processes—institutional negotiation, programming work that unfolds over seasons. So, the breadth and immediacy of Cinemata’s virtuality were, to me, exhilarating. We could assemble films on the same day as Duterte’s arrest by the Interpol, reflect on the social pulse, curate the works, and release them the following day, to provide a visceral and affective intervention to the polarized and highly emotional yelling matches on social media. With this experience, I was newly attuned to what it means for an archive not merely to hold memory but to activate it. The platform’s infrastructure allows disparate works—produced across time, geography, and ideological currents—to converse, even before curatorial intent imposes a frame. Evidence, testimony, art—gathered, unguarded, and waiting.
This comparative position offers no guarantees. But it does grant a method—an aperture through which we might hold competing truths, resist closure, and stay with the contradictions. Not because contradiction is virtuous in itself, but because it is honest. And right now, honesty feels like one of the few resources we still have.
EM: What was your first impression of Cinemata, and how has engaging with its infrastructure and ethos—especially through the Curators’ Residency Program—shaped your thinking around curating and circulating social issue-driven films across the Asia-Pacific? In what ways do you see platforms like Cinemata contributing to the decentralization of film discourse and access in the region?
PC: When I first encountered Cinemata closely—this sprawling, breathing collection of social-issue films from across Asia Pacific—what struck me wasn’t just its breadth, but its quiet defiance. Here is a platform built not on extraction (no algorithms mining your gaze, no premium paywalls) but on collective production and dedicated stewardship. It impressed me to know that an open-source, user-contributed, privacy-respecting platform, maintained by a small but remarkably dedicated team, could sustain a space where films existed as living documents rather than commodities.
It’s a configuration that resists easy comparisons. Positioned against the spectacle and gatekeeping of international film festivals or the extractive logic of streaming giants, Cinemata prompts a recalibration—of how we value moving images, and more crucially, how we imagine their circulation outside the usual economies of prestige and profit.
Moreover, the regional practice I was speaking of earlier—toggling between near and far, attempting to see from within while reaching outward—finds correspondence in Cinemata’s virtuality. It makes possible a regionalism not as fixed geography, but as a shared condition.
What moves me is not just the functionality of [Cinemata]. It is the aspiration embedded in its very construction—the belief that individual artists, political collectives, grassroots organizations, NGOs—can, and have, authored counternarratives worth keeping and disseminating. Some of these works are decades old, others were made in the recent heat of an unfolding crisis. The platform’s genius lay in its refusal to hierarchize: a student film sits alongside a seasoned collective’s work, united not by production value but by shared stakes. All are born of crises, but also of imagination.
EM: What conversations or movements in Southeast Asian cinema are you currently most excited about?
PC: After years of circling around the fault lines of “national” cinema—its necessity, its thresholds, its imagined cohesion—I find myself now drawn toward the regional. Perhaps as a solution, but certainly as another set of questions. Programming films from Southeast Asia has, for me, not so much offered closure to those earlier inquiries as it has opened a new terrain—one where research is inseparable from encounter, and knowledge production must account for affect, misrecognition, and the slipperiness of place. And I am very excited about this.
It would be disingenuous to predict where Southeast Asian cinema is headed, apart from what the industry has already made legible: the expansion of co-productions, the entrenchment of streaming platforms, the persistence (and performance) of the festival circuit. These are, of course, developments that demand our attention. But what continues to arrest me is the very naming—Southeast Asian cinema—as if a region so fractured, so asymmetrically remembered, can be sutured by a name.
To watch these films, to think alongside them, and eventually to arrange them in conversation with one another—this is where the tension resides. What does it mean to bring together works under this regional signifier?
This is not just a matter of semantics. It is a question of ethics: of how we frame bodies of work, how we make meaning of them, and how that meaning circulates.
It is also a question of hope. Certainly not the hope for a coherent, idealized, conceptual region, but the need to register hope, even mundane hope, for a better life for the peoples of the region, especially in its peripheries.
I have tried, however partially, to think through these stakes in programs like Inland, Island, Worlds We Are, and now, through my work with EngageMedia and Cinemata. These are not definitive statements, but gestures toward a regionality that resists flattening, toward solidarities still in the making.
Image from Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD)
Cinemata is a community video platform for films on human rights and environmental justice in the Asia-Pacific. Cinemata highlights essential yet underheard stories, increasing filmmakers’ reach, engagement, and impact, while enabling audiences to discover thought-provoking videos.
