The producer from the Philippines, a guest country of this year's edition, delves into what it's like to make documentaries in her home country

An interview with Kristine Kintana, producer for Filipino company Kamias Overground, now selected for the 2024 Emerging Producers programme. Read her EP profile here.

Why do you produce documentaries? Do you see documentary cinema as an instrument of social and political change?
Kristine Kintana: Documentaries can be instruments of change. But one film can’t bear the burden of the brokenness of a country like the Philippines. The collection of these efforts can create cracks in the facades of corruption, of historical erasure, of fascism. It forces people to ask better questions and forces them to confront realities they may not know they have been ignoring. Documentaries have always been crucial to reminding people about their role in upholding democracy and the parts they must play to take care of humanity. To capture these individual and collective struggles is why we do this. Because if we don’t, who else will?

How do you achieve and maintain work-life balance and foster overall well-being?
Right now, I watch a lot of plays. They take my mind off of deadlines, and it’s a different crowd from the filmmaker’s crowd, so it’s nice, being able to broaden my community and discover new talents and be with new energies.  I also like women’s soccer, so I keep up with the Premiere League, so I’m also concerned about the number of women players who are suffering from ACL injuries. That could be a good doc too, no? I have a pet rabbit that keeps me busy and calm. Good coffee. Good cocktails. Good conversation. Good friends. But documentary production is really intense, and sometimes, I just have to tackle it head-on. Just being really absorbed and focused on work for a time and then taking a sabbatical afterwards.

But, I also teach at an arts college, so I’m always with hip kids. And that makes me extra kind and calm. Lastly, I’m part of a human-rights group, and we campaign about a lot of issues ­– disinformation, dwindling democracy, extrajudicial killings, red-tagging, and  many other issues that the country is facing.

Where do you find audiences for your films?
In the Philippines, households regularly watch documentaries via television. So despite the prevalence of disinformation networks and diminishing audience numbers in cinemas, the country’s thirst for truth and human stories remains. More often than not, documentaries still draw audiences — it’s just a matter of ticket price and awareness. We tap into film festivals with established followings and slants for documentary filmmaking such as the Active Vista Human Rights Film Festival and Daang Dokyu. To reach younger audiences, we partner with non-government organizations and even smaller film clubs whose interests align with either film or the human stories we tackle. We’ve been trying to explore private independent screenings beyond the cinemas, focusing on alternative cinema spaces such as restaurants, bars, and community hubs. That way, the stories exist within the community and not only in the four corners of a theater.

What projects do you have underway (including fiction films and other projects)?
I just finished subtitling around 30 hours of raw footage for a Dutch-Filipino documentary that we are doing about a gay Filipino couple who lived and worked in Amsterdam for 10 years, and is now back in the Philippines, but will try to go back abroad again, because life in the Philippines is hard. We’re trying to get funding for the next stage of production, so fingers crossed.

In the Philippines, I’m part of QCinema International Film Festival, which is the biggest film fest in the country, so it’s almost a year long commitment, from being part of the selection committee which reads almost a hundred scripts, to programming South East Asian features, to the festival itself every November.

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EMERGING PRODUCERS is a leading promotional and educational project, which brings together talented European documentary film producers. The programme is organised and curated by the Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival.

Deadline for applications to the EMERGING PRODUCERS 2025 edition is 31st March 2024.