This book is about this “Sine-Kino-Connection”. It documents the beginnings of the experimental and alternative feel movement of the 1980s in the Philippines. At the same time it is about a part of German film history that few people in Germany are aware of.

Beginning in the mid-1970s and continuing through the 1980s and into the 1990s, a number of German film directors, theorists and other movie people came to work or teach in the Philippines. Some came because the Goethe-Institut Manila invited them for workshops and film presentations. Others came at their own expense because they were fascinated by the Philippines, which – especially after the People Power revolution of 1986 that ousted the Marcos regime – temporarily exercised its own peculiar kind of magnetism to many Europeans.

The workshops that “the Germans” conducted, the film screenings that they presented, were in part responsible for the emergence of an alternative film scene in the Philippines that went on to garner recognition and awards at international film festivals in the 1980s.

Today, a new generation of independent Filipino filmmakers is emerging and once again garnering critical acclaim in the Philippines and abroad. This book provides a historical perspective on the earlier development of experimental, non-mainstream film in the Philippines.

Published in 2007 by Goethe-Institut Manila