MANILA, Philippines — Esteemed filmmaker Carlos Siguion-Reyna is now the Chairman of the Cinemalaya Competition and Monitoring Committee.
Siguion-Reyna succeeded fellow filmmaker Jose Javier Reyes, who is the new Chairman of the Film Development Council of the Philippines.
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Coinciding with his new role, Siguion-Reyna will still be the Cinemalaya Institute Head and Program director, overseeing the educational arm of the annual independent film festival.
The filmmaker has been giving workshops and conducting direction courses at Institute since 2015.
Siguion-Reyna received his MFA in Film at the New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, teaching graduate film courses at its Singapore campus.
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His thesis film "Patas Lang (Fair Exchange)" won an award in the narrative category of the 1989 Nissan FOCUS Awards and was selected as one of The Outstanding Young Filipinos in the field of Arts/Cinema in 1995.
Since then, the director has done 13 feature films, all but one produced under the company Reyna Films, which was previously managed by his late mother, singer-actress Armida Siguion-Reyna.
One of his feature films, "Hari ng Tondo," received the Special Jury Prize in the Directors’ Showcase category of the 10th edition of Cinemalaya back in 2014.
Other films saw similar success in several international film festivals in San Diego, Toronto, Newport Beach, Berlin and Singapore, as well as local industry bodies Gawad Urian, Luna Awards or the Film Academy of the Philippines (FAP) Awards, Filipino Academy of Movie Arts and Sciences Awards (FAMAS) Awards and the Young Critics Circle Awards.
Siguion-Reyna served three terms as president of the Directors' Guild of the Philippines Inc. where he taught film direction and conducted short lectures and workshops as he did at the University of the Philippines Film Institutes, the Cultural Center of the Philippines and the Mowelfund Film Institute.
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