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MARG1N is a Southeast Asian film magazine based in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Our annual publication links two Southeast Asian countries under a single theme, exploring cinema peripherally.
CORNER/SANCTUARY
Lé Baltar & Tito Ramos Quiling, Jr. — Friday, 16 October 2026
Compromised Corners
Lé Baltar Like watching the crest of a great and gorgeous wave crashing ashore, the vicissitudes of belonging and becoming animate the thematic core of three films playing at this year’s KinoFest—Ryan Machado’s Raging (2025), Frauke Lodders’s Gotteskinder (2024), and Cris Bringas’s Body Count (2025)—in how they consider the toll of community and kinship upon individuals on the margins.
In Raging, teenager Eli (Elijah Canlas) retreats irrecoverably inward in the wake of sexual abuse. Nightmares in bed at night shove him into loops of anguish while reminders of what has been lost at day come with a jolt of helplessness. Worse, healing can’t happen anytime soon. The perpetrator Arjo (Ron Angeles), Eli’s peer, walks away scot-free.
“I can’t get it out of my head,” Eli confesses to his Walkman, recalling how long it has lapsed since the wrongdoing—the details of which remain deliberately obscured in a movie that relies upon an after-the-fact temperament to examine the trauma swelling at its center while upending expectations for catharsis. This discernment is the smartest aspect of Machado’s second feature, distancing itself from previous films centered on sexual violence that flatten the experience into a device that choreographs suffering in service of sheer verisimilitude.
Set in mid-90s Romblon and based on a real-life rape case that went nowhere, per Machado’s October 2025 interview with Lifestyle Inquirer, the film unpacks the role a community plays in the context of sexual assault—and the possibility of fostering caring systems in environments now estranged from them. Machado isolates Eli in mostly still, meticulous frames. The protagonist traipses all over town, witnessing various tragedies that simmer like perpetual white noise inside his head.
Amid his predicament, Eli gives way to a necessary but fleeting distraction. Determined to find the wreckage of a plane he witnessed descend into the mountains one stormy day, he enlists the help of his gay best friend, Jopay (Reynald Santos). Through this wayward effort, Machado comments on the relationship between sexual assault and memory, and how survivors are put through the wringer during their involution. It helps that Canlas portrays the abuse as an embodied experience. His terrified visage, slouched posture, and routine zoning-out evoke the contours of an assault survivor’s daily reality. But neither a vanished plane nor the unexplained death of a miner incites the mayor (Glenn Sevilla Mas) and the townspeople to move past inaction or indifference. If anything, they dismiss Eli’s testimony as an imagined tale to protect whatever sense of normalcy they enjoy. For them, not knowing means absolving themselves of any moral and social duty—a sly invocation of Hannah Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil.
The vaporous scenery and ambient soundscape not just lends the film mysticism but also calls attention to something shrouded, working like a leitmotif in the story of a community that cannot confront its own complicity. Machado languidly builds his critique to a Brocka-tinged endnote that betrays the ethos echoed by the film’s title. There are no grand gestures of relief, no legible ways to comprehend the pain that survives. One can read this not only as a gesture of complexity but of sincerity.
Much like Raging, Lodders’s latest is a coming-of-age movie anything but insouciant or bittersweet. More heavily plotted and straightforward than Machado’s sophomore work, Gotteskinder—the German word for “children of God”—follows teenage siblings coming to terms with desire and sexuality within a fundamentalist society.
Hannah (Flora Thiemann) takes a vow of chastity, which will prove difficult to uphold upon the arrival of the free-spirited Max (Michelangelo Fortuzzi) next door. Meanwhile, her brother Timo (Serafin Mishiev) struggles with homosexuality as he confronts his feelings for the equally troubled Jonas (Lennox Halm). For fear of being ostracized and believing queerness can be cured, Timo ships himself to a “pastoring camp,” which Jonas also signs up for. Conflicts mount when their conservative parents and evangelical enclave learn about their “sinful” ways.
Shot in Calden, located in central Germany’s Kassel district, Lodders paints a picture of a small municipal town punctuated by joyous singing and praying. Rendered via widescreen compositions, the devout community brims with possibilities at first glance, but the bulk of scenes taking place at home, in the church, in school corridors, and on a cul-de-sac might hint otherwise, revealing the pervasive control over private life and activity. Even a brief trip to the movies can be seen as courting intimacy with the devil.
Whereas Raging’s protagonist feels detached from the world around him, Hannah and Timo are embedded in church. They ward off a growing cognitive dissonance to further assimilate themselves into “a life with Jesus at its center,” similarly to their father David (Mark Waschke), who thinks he’s got such crises all figured out and is hell-bent on reinstating religious dogma within the family. Lodders often stages confrontations when the family gathers around the dining table, allowing dramaturgy to establish the pecking order within the household, lifting the patriarch at the top. The spacious family home hosts worship gatherings at nightfall. Though daylight pours through glass windows, the gray interiors, aided by cinematographer Johannes Louis’ reliance upon the uneasy neutrality of the medium close-up, evoke the tidiness and coldness of an office setting.
But what comes through most profoundly is how the controlled preservation of the family unit can result in the alienation of self: the way we think, the way we behave, the types of relationships we build. The more we compromise, the film suggests, the more we lose our sense of identity.
The movie is not stripped of tenderness, but it ultimately surrenders to doom and gloom. One protagonist dies. The other becomes trapped in the status quo, their decision disguised as self-agency. The German director presents such fates as an inevitability, which makes for a dubious finale in which alternative paths are stymied, conking out the power of this drama real fast, with no aircrafts in distress to up the impact of the crash.
Raging and Gotteskinder plunge us into festering cynicism, the former more arresting than the latter. In both films, communal affinity is positioned as a brutal act of forgetting the needs of the self. The illusion of placidity can very much enable acts of wrongdoing and leave us fending for ourselves. Community, they suggest, keeps us apart as much as it brings us closer.
Whereas the protagonists of Raging and Gotteskinder are hardly afforded space to verbalize their traumas and desires, Bringas offers the opposite in Body Count, though not without a caveat. In the eighteen-minute documentary still subject to a re-edit, two queer men recount past lives and current desires following a Grindr hookup. Known by aliases, Paul is a Filipino nurse living in Germany for six years while reeling from the death of his brother under Rodrigo Duterte’s notorious regime, whereas David is an Israeli who has previously served in the Zionist military for half a decade.
Reconstructed out of an original fifty-nine-minute audio recording, the film positions both the director and audience as passive listeners. To an extent, it allows Paul respite to be more upfront and intimate about his plight and identity, standing in stark contrast to the characters of Raging and Gotteskinder who are alienated, mocked, or hurt for doing the same. David’s Berlin apartment reinforces that semblance of safety, the warm company of an unmade bed. Bringas shoots the interiors with growing tenderness, switching between wide shots and close-ups, as voiceovered histories echo throughout the flat. As a result, he turns the perfectly manicured place, all soulless whites and neat surfaces, into a site of shared reckonings.
And yet, this gesture of lending our ears without protest to the subjects, especially David, elicits a herd mentality in which the former IDF soldier’s declarations about Palestinian life and the ongoing genocide in Gaza are taken as absolute facts, leaving them unquestioned—similarly to how his identity is readily accepted as mere texture that assumes no political weight. Without the benefit of further interviews or historical archives, the documentary consolidates the plight of the oppressed to that of the oppressor into a single political reality. Belated recollections here, in the shape of a post-sex heart-to-heart, can obscure the magnitude of living in hellish times.
The most chilling bit arrives at the six-minute mark. David’s memory of the most painful act he had inflicted upon Palestinians abruptly cuts to the couple’s moaning and gasping, treating unfathomable suffering as fodder for sex, for cinema. In this way, the sense of community Paul finds in David registers as rather artificial and futile, and the film’s messaging insular. For such a spatially effective picture, the radical possibilities of community ironically exist outside its four corners.
Portable Sanctuaries
Tito Ramos Quiling, Jr.
Across three houses, I carried my mother’s reassurances and the socks that she had packed for me when I left Quezon City for Melbourne. Yet for those without such anchors from home, temporary spaces absorb what domestic and state institutions fail to provide for. With this in mind, Faraz Shariat’s Prosecution (Staatsschutz, 2026) and Daniel Abma’s The Family Approach (Im Prinzip Familie, 2024) show how an urban apartment becomes a workplace and a residential care home substitutes the functions of a family home.
Prosecution opens in darkness before light reveals the courtroom. The controlled entry establishes the space as a threshold between public law and private life. The film follows a Korean-German prosecutor, Seyo Kim (Chen Emilie Yan), who loses the ability to keep that threshold in place as the boundary between the courtroom and her home blurs. She pursues her own case through a legal system that fails to adequately address right-wing extremism.
At first, Seyo’s apartment is a refuge from work. She eats ramen while on a video call with her father (Haeng-Goo Peter Yeo), a taxi driver proud of her, and does yoga. A racist assault disrupts her quotidian routines when she is struck by a Molotov cocktail while on a bike ride. Her black leather jacket catches fire. A panicked Seyo wrenches it off and throws the smoldering garment on the pavement. Despite the shock, she ensures the evidence is documented: her wounds are photographed and added to a case file. While the assault occurs outside the home, its aftermath moves in with her.
Over lunch, Seyo’s father mentions that his passengers assume he cannot understand them and belittle him. His experience of being misread mirrors Seyo’s own encounters with racism. The film suggests a “death by a thousand cuts,” where recurring experiences of othering accumulate. These barriers make self-advocacy difficult for Seyo, who works within an institution meant to provide protection. Seyo insists that her experience deserves recognition as a legitimate case. Her position as a prosecutor does not place her outside the racial dynamics that she addresses, complexifying negotiations.
Tension is expressed through space. As the institution refuses to accommodate her pursuit of the case, Seyo shifts her investigation into the apartment. She uses her expansive glass windows like a detective board, turning the opaque boundary between the inside and outside into a surface for plotting other’s suffering. The car becomes a secondary sanctuary, where Seyo gathers her thoughts alone, offering respite from testifying and performing composure. The film repeatedly shows Seyo working from home, scrounging through documents in basements, and visiting witnesses, as the investigation spills into spaces that were not meant to hold it.
The film’s Neo-Nazis extend beyond the immediate violence against Seyo, engulfing the homes and shared spaces of other immigrants. The montage of witnesses and suspects makes this network spatially visible. Seyo discreetly documents the suspects from her car, behind trees and in parking lots, smartphone in hand. The rushing sound of her car connects these locations together as she drives through the night.
The ending offers a cautionary reclamation. After sentencing the perpetrator, the three exhausted witnesses—all women—gather to hug Seyo. She returns home and dismantles the wall. The photographs, notes, and news clippings come down; the windows are cleaned. The apartment is gradually reclaimed from the investigation. When Min-su (Kotbong Yang) cuts Seyo’s hair there, this gesture from a lover offers a quiet return to domestic intimacy, allowing her shoulders to finally drop and shed the weight of the state’s dereliction.
*
Abma’s documentary features a Landhausstil country house adjacent to a forest and lake. A verandah faces open water across a sprawling lawn. This property functions as a residential care group home. Inside, a kitchen table anchors the common space where the boys eat, study, and spend their evenings. A fox occasionally visits, pacing around in the verandah. The house is looked after by three youth workers: Antje Wagner, Max Gerecke, and Sören Wagner, who take turns cooking, tutoring, and reading bedtime stories. The film is led by two central subjects.
Niklas is a thin, fair-skinned boy who turns eleven. Reserved but quick to anger, he leaves the table halfway through his birthday dinner. The festive setting makes the occasion difficult to sustain for him: a celebration organized by a family that is not his own.
The caregivers write their reports and discuss custody arrangements, sometimes including the boys. These scenes sit alongside the domestic routines, reminding us that the adults are also working in the house. Their recurring meetings demonstrate the union of the house’s domestic and institutional functions. Abma frames this duality through treetops swaying, windmills churning, and the drenched forest floor. These images punctuate the scenes of the youth workers carrying out their responsibilities. The pastoral landscape makes the house appear removed from institutional life, even as the scenes inside it reveal how closely the two functions remain connected.
But these frames also isolate the house. Scarcely any neighbors live around the property. The house sits outside the systems that shape the boys’ lives, such as the courts, welfare offices, and their parents’ homes in the city. Those same systems determine who arrives and leaves.
Niklas wants, more than anything, his mother. The family court process stands between him and her possibility. In the meantime, calls with his mother go unanswered, and plans to see her fall through. When the caregivers tell Niklas the courts’ decision, he cries. Mr. Wagner takes him out for ice cream, offering company in the absence of answers.
Ten-year old Kelvin, a Black child of Cameroonian descent, sits hunched on his bed, while Mr. Wagner asks him about school and therapy. His path to the house ran through language barriers, a maternal absence, six weeks in a psychiatric clinic, and the compounding weight of systemic racism. The state intervenes with Kelvin through medications, occupational therapy, and duty reports that are narrated in voiceover like a case file. Both boys seek a stability the house cannot provide.
When one leaves, their bedroom must be prepared for someone else. Bedrooms are personalized domestic corners, accruing their occupants’ belongings and habits. Here, each room must become someone else’s, its traces and routines soon replaced. Niklas can live in it without fully making it his own, so his departure changes the room’s meaning without altering its function. The empty bedroom shows how easily the institution can reset domestic spaces for the next child.
Meanwhile, the boys and caregivers cook, socialize, eat, and learn in the kitchen. Unlike the bedroom, children arriving juxtaposed against the flow of repeating meals and conversations make the house feel like a home. This comforting but unsettling cycle reveals the institutional contract beneath the domestic rituals: the house must keep becoming a home. Unlike Seyo’s apartment, which absorbs the casework that her institution refuses to hold, this residential care house is designed to absorb new occupants. Its temporality is structural and not incidental.
The house resets. Kelvin’s stuffed toy and belongings vanish from his old bedroom. This cycle complicates domestic space as a stable foundation for belonging, though parts of that temporary existence cement themselves into the boys’ identities. For instance, Niklas calls Ms. Wagner to ask for her pancake recipe.
The house provides routines, care, and attachment but cannot determine how long those relationships last. It invites comparison with residential care in the Philippines, where institutions rely on extended kinship rather than professional caregivers—a different domestic arrangement shaped by the same tensions between care and impermanence. My mother’s socks insulate me against the winters in Melbourne. But the rootless subjects of The Family Approach carry few mementos when they’re left in and depart from spaces where safety is performed and occasionally embodied.