Two music videos serving as prelude. Four world premiering shorts. Two works visualizing emotionally-charged songs. Four stories where oxygen runs thin. Whether from fear, desire, or the weight of what can’t be unseen, each short in this program catches its characters at a breaking point or at a point of discovering. Each point, uncertain when the next breath might be the last or when suffocation requires a turnabout in life.
 

With trademark wit and fearless self-awareness, Mikey Bustos, this edition’s Rytmo Featured Music Artist, turns his music videos into both a mirror and a megaphone. ‘Cancel Me’ is very personal for Mikey. Here he dives headfirst into the digital arena’s most volatile subject: cancel culture. The song balances sharp satire with a disarming willingness to turn the joke on himself. The video plays like a technicolor confession booth, where beats and punchlines blur the line between defense and admission. In ‘Crossroads’, he shifts gears entirely, trading comedy for a heartfelt exploration of identity, purpose, and reinvention. The video is a blend of striking sci-fi visuals and slow music. Mikey invites viewers into the quieter, more vulnerable spaces, asking listeners (and viewers) to take that journey with him through “ups and downs, and highest lows”. The two music videos, directed by Mikey himself and JC Gellidon, act as a crossroad of the Opening Night Program and Shorts Program 1.
 

The first Bakunawa Fest Shorts Program starts with a very early holiday scare. ‘Isang Gabing Nawala ang Diyos’ by Jose Miguel Francisco introduces us to a young child named Bianca and her innocent anticipation of Christmas Eve. A discovery of something wholly unholy by the tree will reveal a truth initially hidden from the viewers when holiday warmth is swiftly replaced by a cold, otherworldly dread.
 

The hush between waves becomes a pressure chamber in ‘Diving for Air’. A young lifeguard, entangled in a secret workplace affair, is forced to navigate the dangerous undercurrents of intimacy, guilt, and family confrontation. Casually blending genres in this complex drama, Singaporean filmmaker Tang Kang Sheng pulls us into the protagonist’s constricted world of inescapable consequences.
 

Meanwhile, the cultural feature assignment of a rookie journalist becomes a descent into menace in ‘Caraingin’ by Edgar Allan Reyes. Sent to cover the fading culinary traditions of a remote village, Rowana and cameraman Joel will discover customs and rituals locals would protect as if their lives depended on it. Like every journalist’s assignment, not all truths are recorded by the camera.
 

And in ‘The Night is Alive’ by Vincent Ibut, Manila becomes a playground of panic as a strange virus spreads. Miggy and Jimmy, treating the outbreak as an absurd adventure, set out to loot a supermarket but when infection creeps closer to home, their irreverent quest turns into a fight for survival.
 

Each film in ‘Gasping for the Unseen’ program finds its characters caught between holding it together and losing control. Whatever the genre, the stories here capture moments where every inhale feels like a gamble, and every exhale might just be the last.