‘They Made Monsters’ to premiere at SGIFF this October
‘They Made Monsters’ to premiere at SGIFF this October
SINEGANG.ph published this press release by They Made Monsters. No staff writer participated in writing this article.
IIn the depths of an isolated forest, 14-year-old Joaquin lives under the rigid rule of his father, Ferds, who makes a living hunting and killing monsters. Eager to prove himself, Joaquin sees his first kill as a rite of passage into manhood. But when father and son capture a strange creature unlike anything they have encountered before, their world begins to unravel. As Ferds becomes increasingly consumed by the captive creature, Joaquin is haunted by its painfully human cries and begins questioning everything he has been taught. What begins as a hunt for monsters slowly becomes a confrontation with the violence, fear, and ideology passed down from one generation to the next.
Directed and written by Jaime Morados and produced by Teri Malvar, They Made Monsters is a 17-minute Filipino mixed-media narrative thriller. The film stars Juan Santino Santiago as Joaquin, Cedrick Juan as Ferds, and Robert Joshua San Luis as the Monster.
At its core, the film explores inherited violence, the culture of silence within Filipino families, and the fragile performance of masculinity. For Morados, the monster is not simply something that exists outside of us, but something we can be taught to fear, recognize, and eventually become. The film asks what happens when violent ideas are normalized within society and then carried into the home, where they can be inherited and repeated.
They Made Monsters is part of the inaugural CreatePHFilms Short Film Fund, launched by the Film Development Council of the Philippines in 2025. It was selected as one of six projects in the fund’s first batch of grantees, supporting culturally rooted and original Filipino short filmmaking across genres.
AT THE SINGAPORE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
They Made Monsters will screen as part of the Southeast Asian Short Film Competition, which this year presents 24 films across five programmes, showcasing the range of contemporary short filmmaking from across the region.
The film is included in Programme 2: The Forest Remembers:
29 October 2026, Thursday | 6:00 PM
98 min | NC16
Golden Village Cineleisure, Hall 2
Founded in 1987, the Singapore International Film Festival (SGIFF) is Singapore’s longest-running film festival and a major platform for independent and Southeast Asian cinema. Beyond its annual programme, SGIFF also supports regional filmmakers through its industry platform, SGIFF Pro. Its stated vision is to celebrate cinema’s ability to “inform, transform and inspire,” with a particular focus on Southeast Asian films.
OTHER FILIPINO FILMS AT SGIFF
The festival’s Filipino selections also include Gabriela Serrano and Mariana Serrano’s “Surface Tension”, a 17-minute film about a young swimmer returning home for a cousin’s wedding while struggling with grief and heartbreak, and Dale’s “Kara: The Burning Woman”, a 20-minute film set amid killings in the Negros Island countryside, where residents develop deadly antibodies while a woman in Bacolod experiences an extreme rise in body temperature.
Together, the three films represent distinct approaches to contemporary Filipino short filmmaking, bringing stories from the Philippines into a broader Southeast Asian cinematic conversation.
OTHER HIGHLIGHTS AT SGIFF
The 2026 festival also features Hur Jin-ho’s “The Assassin(s)”, making its Southeast Asian Premiere. Set in South Korea in 1974, the historical procedural follows a detective, reporter, and editor investigating a shooting while confronting efforts by the government to suppress the truth.
SGIFF will also honour acclaimed Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Koreeda with the Cinema Honorary Award, recognising his enduring contribution to Asian cinema. Koreeda is known for films including “Shoplifters”, “Like Father”, “Like Son”, and “Still Walking”.
THEY MADE MONSTERS will also make its Philippine premiere soon. Details on the this will be announced at a later date.
