GENERAL SANTOS CITY — The Mindanao Festival of Slow Cinema will bring its contemplative films to General Santos City on April 18, following its opening in Davao City last week. The pop‑up screening begins at 6 p.m. at Sip Station Café, located at the corner of Quezon Avenue and Sampaloc Street.
Festival director Teng Mangansakan said the event is a traveling showcase dedicated to works that resist the pace and spectacle of mainstream cinema. Instead, it highlights films that embrace stillness, long takes, and the fragile textures of everyday life.
“Slow cinema invites us to look again,” Mangansakan said. “It is a cinema of patience, where time is not something to be conquered but inhabited. These films ask us to linger, to sit with silence, and to rediscover the poetry of the ordinary.”
The GenSan program features Mangansakan’s own film Salome, a lyrical work partly shot in General Santos City and Tupi, South Cotabato. Rooted in Mindanaoan landscapes and interior lives, Salome continues his exploration of memory, identity, and unseen tensions in daily existence.
Complementing the screening is Quiet Currents: A Slow Cinema Marathon, a curated selection of films from Asia and the Philippines. The lineup introduces audiences to the contemplative rhythms of slow cinema, characterized by minimal dialogue, extended duration, and deep attentiveness to space and human presence.
Mangansakan noted that Asia has long been a home for slow cinema, where filmmakers use stillness and duration as narrative tools.
“From quiet urban alienation to rural introspection, these films reveal lives unfolding in real time, often blurring the line between fiction and lived experience,” he said.
The festival aims to cultivate this sensibility among audiences in Mindanao, creating spaces where films are not simply watched but experienced. The April 18 screening is free and open to the public.
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