THE REMOTES
2026, 153 minutes, The Philippines, 1.66:1, Color, 5.1 Sound, in Tagalog and English with English subtitles
Sales/Festivals: Diversion
Synopsis:
Days before migrating abroad, a grieving detective investigates two sisters linked to a sinister navigation app, only to find himself slowly surrendering to the unseen voices controlling the city and his own lingering sorrow.
Director's Statement (excerpt)
The Remotes explores this hunger to surrender. Especially when the voice giving commands feels like home. It centers on the grief of losing a loved one, then hearing her speak again inside a headset, controlling your body, guiding you through roads you’ve never driven, asking nothing in return but obedience.
The Remotes is about how longing can become infrastructure. How grief stifles us while technology listens in and automates our choices in life. This is a world where people willingly surrender to it because it brings them closer to someone they lost, or someone they used to be
About the Director:
JOHN TORRES (b. 1975) is an independent filmmaker, musician, and writer, known for his highly personal and poetic style. His work fictionalizes and reworks personal and found documentations of love, family relations, and memory in relation to current events, hearsay, myth, and folklore. Weaving together archival clips, found footage, and visually powerful imagery, his films unfold narrative structures, often with strong autobiographical references, that defy conventional tropes and genres.
