Filipino Sapphic Drama ‘Open Endings’ to Make Asian Premiere at HKLGFF
Filipino sapphic drama "Open Endings" will have its Asian premiere at the 37th Hong Kong Lesbian & Gay Film Festival in September 2026.
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Aug 11, 2026
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3 min readThe Filipino sapphic drama “Open Endings” (2025) has been selected for the 37th Hong Kong Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, running September 4–20, 2026, marking the film’s Asian premiere.
Directed by Nigel Santos and written by Keavy Eunice Vicente, the film follows four queer women in their 30s navigating love, friendship, and chosen family.
The selection places the Philippine production alongside a notably strong lineup of Asian queer cinema at Asia’s longest-running LGBTQ+ film festival.
Cast and Premise
Janella Salvador, Jasmine Curtis-Smith, Klea Pineda, and Leanne Mamonong star as the four queer women at the center of the ensemble drama.
The 110-minute Tagalog-language production charts the intertwined relationships of women in their thirties, exploring how romantic entanglements, friendships and chosen family reshape one another over time.
Cinemalaya Recognition and Streaming
“Open Endings” won a Special Citation for Best Ensemble Performance at the 2025 Cinemalaya Independent Film Festival in the Philippines.
The recognition that helped position the film for international festival play.
The film began streaming on Prime Video on July 17, 2026, broadening its reach beyond the Philippine festival circuit and theatrical run before the Hong Kong bow.
Festival Context
The 37th HKLGFF presents its largest programme in recent years, with 37 feature films and 38 shorts, organized into six “moods” — Love, Laugh, Reflect, Thrill, Pride, and Remember — rather than the geographical and identity-based divisions of prior editions.
The festival abandons its previous categorical structure this year in favor of an audience-driven curatorial approach, with filmmakers and guests from around the world participating in post-screening Q&As.
Asian cinema maintains a strong presence across the lineup.
The festival opens September 4 with the double bill of “Stop! That! Train!” and the Joan Chen-led “Montréal, My Beautiful,” directed by Chinese-Canadian filmmaker He Xiaodan.
In “Montréal, My Beautiful,” the two-time Golden Horse Best Actress winner plays a middle-aged immigrant mother confronting suppressed desire.
Asian titles take over the closing slots as well: Anshul Chauhan’s Japanese drama “Tiger,” starring Takashi Kawaguchi as a middle-aged gay masseur navigating Shinjuku Ni-chōme, and the Filipino adult animated feature “ZsaZsa Zaturnnah,” directed by Avid Liongoren and adapted from Carlo Vergara’s Philippine comic, close the festival on September 20.
Other Asian selections include the Chinese world premiere “Under the Gaze of Night,” the Korean feature “What We Saw,” and the Taiwanese television film “Crown Shyness.”
The Cinemalaya-recognized “Open Endings” slots into a programme where Filipino storytelling claims two of the festival’s most prominent closing positions.
A concentration that reflects both the country’s recent output of queer cinema and Hong Kong’s longstanding role as a regional hub for LGBTQ+ film exhibition.
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