How ‘Yellowfin’ brought Filipino immersive storytelling to Cannes

Who are the people and communities at the centre of the film? Why choose to centre on them?

EDM: The lead, Eduardo Kawasan Jr, known as Popi in the film, is himself a tuna fisherman. One who has worked the floors of several canning companies in General Santos City, handled hauls at the port, and, when the off-season arrives, sails out alone into the open sea to chase his own catch. A man who lives, in his waking life, the very story I set out to tell.

When I first met him and heard about his life, I turned to my Production Coordinator and said: “It’s as if life truly imitates art.” I was struck by what he simply was. The character already existed. That is the practice, to find people already living the truth I want to speak of, and to frame their reality with the transformative power of cinematic magic.

Barangay Tinoto in Sarangani is the community that brought Yellowfin to life. The townspeople became the film. As I do across much of my work, I have always chosen to cast authentic people in their real environments, living as they have always lived, unburdened by the pressure to perform a version of it. Eduardo is the interior crisis of Yellowfin made flesh; the film is docu-fiction at its core. 

See also: To be in the frame: Wawi Navarroza on self-portraiture as language, history and return

Why was virtual reality the right format for this story instead of a traditional film?

EDM: I am a traditional 2D cinematic filmmaker. I have loved cinema since I was a young girl, and that love made me an astute cinephile. I have produced ten feature films over the last few years, some from top Filipino filmmakers, with a couple of serial projects in between, and my last short premiered at the Cinemalaya and Locarno Film Festivals. My respect for cinema is a religion, one I continue to hold with faith.

But it was when I was invited to be part of the first Biennale College VR, which culminated at the 74th Venice Film Festival, that my eyes were opened to the power of the 360° VR medium. This instrument is especially conceived to fully immerse the audience, much like cinema, but cinema without boundaries. It was an organic experimentation, a leap I had always wanted to make, what is beyond cinema? Is there something else in art that can capture life so sincerely? To witness the power of it, and to meet the pioneers who catapulted 360° VR into what it is today, was to understand a new paradox; to experience this kind of immersion is to be absent from oneself while retaining full authority over what you encounter. The format, then, arrived before the narrative of Yellowfin.

I was determined to create an original 360° VR film from the Philippines, one that could take anyone anywhere, make them feel and smell our archipelago. The narrative had to be conceived specifically for the medium. I am not claiming that 360° VR is the next chapter of cinema. Rather, it is cinema's companion, a form built for a world that hungers for a more empathetic embrace of experience. What lies ahead may simply be a steady, forthright gaze at the place where cultural imagination and technological possibility meet. 

And wherever this medium goes, I will be there. Any filmmaker who has stood inside a 360° VR environment and felt the audience lose themselves in it knows that something irreversible has happened. You cannot unfeel that. The two forms live differently in the body, and I intend to keep working in both.

What does it mean for the team to bring Yellowfin to the Cannes Immersive Competition?

EDM: It was a moment that arrived with the full weight of everything it took to get there. To be selected, to stand as the first 360° VR work from the Philippines to compete at the Cannes Film Festival, was something none of us had words for. Only tears.

To bring this work to Cannes felt as surreal as the story itself. After years of labour, of uncertainty, of returning to something that kept asking more of us than we thought we had left to give, the film arrived. Our producers Gian Carlo Librojo and Kyle Nieva—the latter of whom also served as the film’s editor. Our production designer, Kaye Banaag. And our lead actress and composer, Alyanna Cabral. Executive producers Jack Weinstein, Jen Abrot of JAR Entertainment and Jan Pineda of Tarzeer Pictures. 

Together, we represented Yellowfin on behalf of everyone who could not be there, the hundreds of crew and cast members from General Santos City and Sarangani Bay, CMB Film Services, Narra Post Production, the Film Development Council of the Philippines and the many others who believed in this project from its conception to its completion.

This film was, above all, a devotion, Kyle Nieva’s and mine, yes, though never ours alone. It was the accumulated tenacity of every artist, technician, and dreamer who refused to let Yellowfin disappear. And true enough, Yellowfin found its way to completion. 

What was the audience reaction like during screenings or previews?

Jack Weinstein (JW): More than a hundred spectators sat enraptured, their faces obscured by the VR headsets each wore, lost in another world, our Yellowfin world. It was a curious spectacle, each audience member looking up, down, and side to side, completely unaware of those around them. Together, they gasped and sighed at each emotional moment. It was a shared experience unlike that of a traditional theatre because, for each participant, the film was made for them and them alone.

As one of the first Philippine immersive projects at Cannes, what do you hope this means for Filipino filmmakers?

EDM: For what it’s worth, we navigated the full complexity of pioneering an independently produced 360° VR film, its production process, its breakthroughs, its failures and everything in between, so that those who follow will not have to begin from nothing. That journey is now the evidence, a repository of hard-won knowledge about what it actually requires. Screen Asia’s Kyle Nieva, because of this journey, is, without question, the foremost 360° VR expert our country has produced. 

And to create an immersive project of this nature is no small undertaking, and there is, as yet, no universal blueprint. What we have probably done, however imperfectly, is begin to draw one. The technical barriers, workflow, post-production infrastructure, access to equipment and the absence of local specialists are real and documented. We lived inside them for four years.

Now, the medium is gaining considerable momentum, driven increasingly by the ambitions of major museums, galleries and cultural institutions across the world that have recognised its capacity for experiential and humanistic significance. As the technology continues to mature, streamlining production pipelines, reducing costs and lowering the threshold of access, it will become available to any Filipino storyteller willing to learn its language. Not only filmmakers. Across the full breadth of Filipino creative practice, visual artists, performance artists, writers and musicians, the possibilities are vast.

What statement do you hope Yellowfin makes about Southeast Asian storytelling on the global stage?

EDM: With Yellowfin, we have finally arrived in this medium with intention, and we are not leaving. But the statement we hope the film makes is not primarily about us. It is about what this region carries and what this medium, uniquely, is capable of holding. The stories of Southeast Asia, our waters, our people, our particular and irreducible way of understanding the world, have long existed at the intersection of the natural and the philosophical. That is precisely the territory that immersive cinema was built to inhabit. 

The Southeast Asian microcosm, with its density of culture, its layered histories and unbroken relationship with the natural world, may be uniquely suited to it in ways that other cinematic traditions are only beginning to realise. We are a culture of specificity, of stories that resist reduction, that demand the full weight of form to be told truthfully. Immersive cinema may be precisely that form. And if Yellowfin has done nothing else, it has established that the imagination required to inhabit this medium fully, to bend it toward something true and human and particular, is here, in Southeast Asia.

After Cannes, what's next for the project and the team?

EDM: Yellowfin will continue its international tour before we bring it home. Through Tarzeer Pictures and their gallery space, we intend to premiere the work in the Philippines. After all, it belongs to the Filipino audience it was made for. Most critically, we aim to return it to General Santos and Sarangani, so that the communities whose lives, labour and landscape made this project possible may be among the first to experience it. 

Looking ahead, 2026 marks a season of considerable expansion for our creative collective. Screen Asia is currently in pre-production on Kyle Nieva’s short film Clean Sheet, to be shot in South Korea, a work that signals the continued ambition and growing international reach of the filmmakers who brought Yellowfin to life. Concurrently, later this year, we move into production on my debut feature film, Once Upon a Time in the Philippines, a France-Norway-Philippines co-production whose screenplay has earned recognition at the Cannes Cinéfondation L’Atelier, the Locarno Film Festival and the Torino Film Lab, and has received both the prestigious Sorfond and CNC Grants, among others. 

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