John Torres (b. 1975) is an independent filmmaker, musician, and writer, known for his highly personal and poetic style.
His work fictionalizes and reworks personal and found documentations of love, family relations, and memory in relation to current events, hearsay, myth, and folklore. Weaving together archival clips, found footage, and visually powerful imagery, his films unfold narrative structures, often with strong autobiographical references, that defy conventional tropes and genres.
John emerged alongside a generation of friends and collaborators that included Lav Diaz, Khavn De La Cruz, and Raya Martin, part of what the Harvard Film Archive has called a "veritable Filipino New Wave."
In 2006, he was awarded the Dragons & Tigers Award for Young Cinema at the 25th Vancouver International Film Festival for his debut feature, Todo Todo Teros, with a jury that included filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul. That connection continued in 2025 at Apichatpong's Bangkok Experimental Film Festival, where John presented the film-performance version of Room in a Crowd, commissioned by the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts through Los Angeles Filmforum.
John has made six features and more than a dozen short films, including The Remotes, his narrative feature debut.
He was a featured artist at The Flaherty Seminar in 2018, invited by that year's curators Kevin Jerome Everson and Greg de Cuir Jr., and an artist-in-residence at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art (NTU CCA) Singapore in 2019.
In 2024, he returned to Toronto as Filmmaker-in-Residence at the University of Toronto, where he also delivered the artist talk "Parasitical Filmmaking Strategies (Or, How Familial Relationships Influence Our Filmmaking)."
Together with Shireen Seno of Los Otros, a Manila-based platform for the intersections of film and art, John is the recipient of the 2025 Han Nefkens Foundation, Mori Art Museum, M+ and Singapore Art Museum – Moving Image Commission.
A special focus of John's works was shown in Oberhausen in 2024 and at the Viennale in 2013. In 2018 the Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival gave John and Shireen their first major UK retrospective, alongside a seminar the two co-led on Los Otros' history, community, and working methods.
YIDFF 2019 (Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival): Invited panelist, symposium "The Time-Space of Images: Towards a Multi-faceted Film Archive," Yamagata Museum of Art, Oct 12, 2019. Delivered a 20-minute talk on the use of archival footage and film/national history as philosophy in his work, alongside panelists Aribam Syam Sharma, Tarun Bhartiya, Tochigi Akira (film archivist), and Fujii Hikaru (artist/filmmaker).
Across Asia Film Festival, Cagliari (Sardinia): Invited masterclass and Q&A, Dec 19–21, 2019, hosted by co-directors Maria Paola Zedda and Stefano Galanti; screened We Still Have to Close Our Eyes. Also conducted a remote masterclass for Sardinian art-school students during the 2020 pandemic lockdown.
ArteVisione 2023 (Careof, Milan): Visiting professor and mentor (with Shireen Seno) to emerging artists, arranged in collaboration with Maria Paola Zedda.
FLY Film Lab 2019: Sponsored by the Asian Film Commissions Network, Torres served as a lab session mentor and moderator, leading specialized production workshops for young, emerging directors from across Southeast Asia (FLY Film Lab Session Logs).
14th Jogja-NETPAC Asian Film Festival (JAFF), Yogyakarta: NETPAC jury member, Nov 19–23, 2019, alongside actor-director Paul Agusta. Also led a screenwriting workshop session, discussing regional cinema and reviewing pitches from five young Indonesian directors and five producers.
AsiaDoc (Forum Film Dokumenter / FFD, Yogyakarta): Invited by Amerta Kusuma to serve as directing mentor for this creative documentary workshop, co-organized with French partner organization Docmonde. Mentored twice: the 2019 edition in person in Jogja (Aug 20–31), reviewing and helping select 12 participants from 54 submissions; and the 2021 edition fully online over four weeks (Oct–Nov), co-mentoring alongside Laurent Bécue-Renard (Alice Films) and Huang (Moolin Films), with participants joining from across Indonesia, Taiwan, and Myanmar.
SEAScreen gathering, Makassar: Regional Southeast Asian filmmakers' workshop/gathering hosted by director Riri Riza through Rumata' Artspace, circa 2012, alongside Tan Chui Mui, Aditya Assarat, Kan Lume, Lola Amaria, Mouly Surya, and Philip Cheah.
Next New Wave: 2nd Young Filmmakers Workshop, Kuala Lumpur (2016): Invited as Directing Mentor by founder Tan Chui Mui, selecting and guiding the workshop's directing participants; featured in an interview with R.AGE (The Star's youth platform). Continued association with Tan Chui Mui's initiatives, including as a SeaShorts Film Festival jury member (2019).
Art Beats Festival, Sunway University: Masterclass I, "Sensing Film," guest of honour masterclass on process-over-output filmmaking approaches, alongside masterclasses by Ghazi Alqudcy and Lim Wei Jie.
Invited speaker, Producers Lab talk, December 2018.
NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore: Full artist residency, Jan 8–March 28, 2019, developing "parasitical filmmaking strategies" — positioning at the edges of other productions to reuse their leftover resources.
Hanoi DocFest / SEACRN Symposium (Nov 2017): Invited talk (delivered remotely), organized with Nguyễn Trịnh Thị (Hanoi DOCLAB founder), representing NANG magazine's perspective on Southeast Asian cinema archives.
Produire au Sud (PaS), Bangkok Workshop (2014): Participated with Shireen Seno in this international co-production training program (Festival des 3 Continents, Nantes), developing Nervous Translation.
Produire au Sud 20th Anniversary (2021): Nervous Translation selected for the official "20 Years of Produire au Sud" retrospective; featured in "L'Interview," a video conversation with Julia Hammett-Jamart on the Festival des 3 Continents' YouTube channel, discussing the film's production journey as a case study.
University of Toronto Mississauga: Filmmaker-in-Residence, March 16–22, 2024 (with Shireen Seno), hosted by Prof. Elizabeth Wijaya and Weijie Lai.
University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM): During a residency with the Department of Visual Studies, Torres delivered a prominent public artist talk titled "Parasitical filmmaking strategies (Or, how familial relationships influence our filmmaking)" (Los Otros Facebook Updates).
University of San Diego (USD): Hosted by filmmaker/educator Lev Kalman. Q&A for We Still Have to Close Our Eyes, San Diego Asian Film Festival (SDAFF), Sept 27, 2020. Followed by a guest class visit, March 17, 2021 — a 60–90 minute shot-framing exercise ("Shot Sizes": WS-Where, MS-What, CU-Who, ECU-Why) plus a 45-minute artist talk.
The Flaherty Seminar, Colgate University: Featured Artist, 2018.
Beijing art residency: Hosted by artist/producer Xiao-Dong Guo (New Asian Scenery) in Songzhuang art village, Tongzhou District, Beijing, June 2019 — a week-long stay with fellow visiting artists from Malaysia and Korea.
UCCA (Beijing): Invited talk on Filipino film (~90 minutes) paired with a curated screening of Filipino experimental/underground shorts, June 2019, arranged by Xiao-Dong Guo.
Städelschule, Frankfurt: Invited lecture, December 2019, held alongside the joint exhibition Cloudy with a Chance of Coconuts with Shireen Seno at Portikus.
Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival: "Filmmaker in Focus" feature and accompanying talk, September 2018, as part of a UK tour with Los Otros that also included Tate Modern.
Asia Art Archive: Invited participant, "Inter-Archives Conversations: Instructions in Artists' Archives" (2023) and related programming on Southeast Asian archival practice.
Co-editor of NANG, the Asian cinema magazine, with Korean film critic Yoo Un-seong — a direct Filipino–Korean critical collaboration.
DMZ International Documentary Film Festival: Industry engagement and VODA Fund selection (2023).