Aug. 11, 2025
Seneca News
48-hour film competition brings ‘jaw-dropping win’
Five graduates win Best Film at Toronto event
In Filipino culture, pagpag is a ritual traditionally performed after a funeral to shake off lingering spirits and stop them from following you home.
Ignoring pagpag is said to bring about bad luck yet basing a short film on it seems to have a very different outcome.
Several Seneca Polytechnic graduates were part of the team that recently beat out 58 competitors to win Best Film at a Toronto 48 Hour Film Project event for Pagpag – a horror short that they had to create from scratch over one adrenaline-packed weekend.
“With the right people around you, you can create beautiful things,” said Allen Sam, a graduate of Seneca’s Broadcasting – Television program who worked on the film as first assistant camera.
The 48 Hour Film Project is a worldwide competition in which filmmaking teams are given 48 hours to make a movie. They must fit their creation into a certain genre, while using a specific prop, character and line of dialogue. Requirements are only announced at the start of the 48 hours, so that competitors cannot plan anything in advance.
“Sometimes you get stressed by how little time there is, but it’s also how you push yourself to be professional,” said Gale Roxas-Formentera, also a Broadcasting – Television graduate and Pagpag’s first assistant director and production co-ordinator.
For this event, all films had to be in either the horror or science fiction genre. Ms. Roxas-Formentera, Mr. Sam and their teammates quickly landed on the concept of pagpag and a plot in which the two main characters ignored the superstition, returned home right after a funeral and mayhem ensued.
One of the keys to their team’s success was that many of them have worked together under the leadership of director and screenwriter Clark Cameron Marcelo for years, dating back to when they were students looking for entry points to the film scene.
“We trust each other. If anything goes wrong, we know that we’ll be able to resolve it right away,” said Ms. Roxas-Formentera.
The group works together as a true collective, operating under the name Unsalted Films. Other Seneca graduates who worked on Pagpag include editor Brian Ferrer, sound mixer and boom operator David Pen and actor Gigi Suico. Ms. Suico is a graduate of Seneca’s Event & Media Production program, while Mr. Ferrer and Mr. Pen are Broadcasting – Television graduates.
As the group watched the weekend-ending award ceremony, they weren’t surprised that they weren’t hearing their name. They had been impressed by most of the other entries and felt the winners were deserving.
However, they were eventually announced as the recipients of the final and most prestigious award for Best Film, a revelation that Mr. Sam described as “jaw-dropping.”
For Ms. Roxas-Formentera, who arrived at Seneca as an international student from the Philippines, Pagpag – which was written entirely in Tagalog – represented a chance to tell a story from her home to a wider audience. Those opportunities for cultural storytelling are what motivate her as a filmmaker.
“Canada is the best place to share stories because everyone’s open to inclusivity and diversity,” she said.
“There’s an opportunity for Asians to tell our own stories here. It’s the best way to represent our roots.”
As winners of the competition, the Unsalted Films team received an invitation to represent Toronto next year at Filmapalooza in Lisbon, Portugal. They’re also keeping busy with other TV and film production work, including The Caretaker, a Filipino horror film centred on the immigrant experience with a supernatural twist.