A young Filipina filmmaker attempts to overwrite a painful memory of her mother with a perfect narrative.
Festival Trailer
notable screenings & awards
Best Writing, TIFF Next Wave 2024
Best Director for a Canadian Short, Vancouver Asian Film Festival 2024
Jury Prize, Ottawa Canadian Film Festival 2024
Student Merit Award, Canadian Cinema Editors Awards 2023
Winner, Student Cinematography, Canadian Society of Cinematographers Awards 2024
UFVA Carole Fielding Grant 2023
Cleveland Int. Film Festival '25
SCAD Savannah Film Festival '24
Canadian Film Festival '24
AMC+ Future of Film: Athena's Rising Stars
Desync is a tightly-written story that offers many emotions and themes, and hits every one of them with delicate accuracy. I highly recommend giving this one a watch.
- Film 613
Ana (Jadyn Nasato), a young Filipina film director, struggles to shoot an emotional scene between a mother (Anjelica Alejandro) and her daughter (Tatiana Ashton), who can’t seem to see eye-to-eye while they prepare food for a visiting relative. The scene, we learn, is pulled from a painful, real-life conversation the director had with her own mother, Celine (Jennifer Villaverde). To Ana, this is all about trying to rewrite the past.
Unlike the character in her short, director Minerva Navasca is in total control here. Deftly balancing two mother-daughter conversations, one from the past and the other in the present, her and Chen-Sing Yap’s script is sharp and poignant. They hone in on the gnawing regret that comes when you don’t necessarily mean what you say and, by extension, when you don’t say what you feel. The performances, particularly Nasato’s, fuel the short, but it’s the impeccable editing by Yap that helps it cross the finish line.
- Jericho Tadeo, The Asian Cut
