Jason Tan Liwag is a Filipino scientist, actor, writer, educator, and curator from Dagupan City, Philippines. His work examines the life cycle of moving images and criticism in Southeast Asia, focusing on state terror, memory, erasure, gender, and disability. He is an alumnus of film criticism programmes in Locarno, Rotterdam, Udine, Yamagata, and Manila, and the founder of the QCinema Critics Lab. He has served on the juries and selection committees of festivals in Singapore, Dhaka, San Diego, Bristol, Taipei, Manila, and Cebu, and is a four-time international voter for the Golden Globe Awards and the Dorian Awards. Presently, he programmes shorts for QCinema and the Leeds International Film Festival, coordinates the iNDIEGENIUS Project Lab, and lectures part-time at iACADEMY and the CIIT College of Arts and Technology. For his contributions to the arts and sciences, he was featured in Attitude Magazine’s 101 LGBTQ Trailblazers Changing the World Today in 2020.
Jason Tan Liwag
Jason Tan Liwag participated in “Greatest” Short Films of All Time 2025, a first-ever poll of its kind as a collective love letter to the art of short-form moving image. yanco and Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg, in collaboration with Talking Shorts, invited filmmakers, curators, distributors, critics, and scholars worldwide to nominate 10 audiovisual works under sixty minutes that they personally consider the “greatest” of all time. This was Jason Tan Liwag’s submission:
| Movie | Original Title | Director | Country | Year | Duration | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Eternity Ang Magpakailanman | Raymond Red | Philippines | 1982 | 25’ | ||
Shot on Super 8, Raymond Red's first film is arguably his sharpest, most inventive, and most poetically disturbing. |
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| La Jetée | Chris Marker | France | 1962 | 28’ | ||
| Neighbours | Norman McLaren | Canada | 1952 | 9’ | ||
| Johnny Crawl Juan Gapang | Roxlee, Yeye Calderon, At Maculangan | Philippines | 1986 | 7’ | ||
Made at the height of resistance against the dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr. A parable for the everyday Filipino. |
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| The House Is Black Khaneh siah ast | Forugh Farrokzhad | Iran | 1963 | 22’ | ||
| I Like Life a Lot Nekem az élet teccik nagyon | Kati Macskássy | Hungary | 1977 | 9’ | ||
| ABCD | Roxlee | Philippines | 1985 | 5’ | ||
One of Roxlee's masterpieces and a brilliant way of using the alphabet song to teach children about the horrors of today, yesterday, and tomorrow. |
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| The Kiss | Eadweard Muybridge | USA | 1882 | 1’ | ||
| Nuit et brouillard Night and Fog | Alain Resnais | France | 1955 | 32’ | ||
| Orbit 50: Letters to my 3 Sons | Kidlat Tahimik | Philippines | 1992 | 18’ | ||
Maybe the sweetest experimental film of all time from one of the most generous souls in Philippine cinema. |
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