Puregold CinePanalo short film ‘Starfish’ explores forces shaping Filipino lives

Inside “Starfish”: A haunting look at family, power, and the silent struggles shaping Filipino survival today.

Puregold CinePanalo short film “Starfish” will premiere alongside 19 other student short films at this year’s festival, bringing to the screen an intimate and emotionally charged story about family, power, and the quiet expectations that shape Filipino lives.

Directed by John Clite Apolinar (Polytechnic University of the Philippines), “Starfish” follows Boyet, a former male sex worker who returns to his hometown after years in Manila, hoping to leave his past behind. Instead, he finds himself confronting old family wounds, political influence, and the same culture of silence and endurance that followed him long before he left home.

For Apolinar, “Starfish” is less about one man’s tragedy than about the invisible systems that shape the choices ordinary Filipinos believe they can make.

“At its core, ‘Starfish’ is an allegory of what it means to be Filipino today,” Apolinar said. “I hope audiences recognize the cycle of struggle and pain created by the expectation that Filipinos quietly endure hardship and simply survive.”

Rather than portraying resilience as an unquestioned virtue, the film asks what happens when resilience becomes an obligation—when people are expected to carry suffering without ever questioning the conditions that made such endurance necessary. 

Through Boyet’s journey, “Starfish” reflects on how survival can become so deeply ingrained that imagining a different life begins to feel impossible.

The film also challenges familiar ideas about the Filipino family. While families are often seen as places of comfort and protection, “Starfish” explores how love can exist alongside fear, obligation, and silence. These pressures are not born from cruelty alone, but from generations of inherited expectations passed from one person to another.

Beyond the home, “Starfish” examines how political power quietly reaches into everyday life. Through the relationship between Boyet’s family and the town’s influential mayor, the film shows how authority, social hierarchy, and traditional ideas of masculinity shape personal relationships, opportunities, and even the futures people imagine for themselves.

Although the film raises questions about freedom and self-determination, Apolinar believes freedom begins with recognizing the forces that shape people’s lives.

“For ‘Starfish,’ freedom is not simply the absence of restrictions,” he said. “It is the ability to recognize the forces that shape your life and still find the courage to make choices that reflect your own identity and desires.”

Ultimately, “Starfish” asks a difficult question: What happens to a person who is expected to endure everything? Through Boyet’s story, the film invites audiences to look beyond individual choices and reflect on the social, political, and cultural systems that ask Filipinos not simply to live, but to survive.

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