EXCLUSIVE: Filipino filmmaker and producer Antoinette Jadaone, whose credits include Berlinale award winner Sunshine, is launching a new production outfit Ilaya Ilaya with a slate spanning genre films, television originals and immersive theatre.

Jadaone will run the company with longtime collaborator and producer Reign Anne De Guzman (Sunshine, That Thing Called Tadhana), who has collaborated with her since they both worked at Star Cinema, where Jadaone was a script continuity supervisor and De Guzman a production assistant.

Through their new outfit, the duo aim to champion Filipino cinema, women-led stories, unappreciated genres, and filmmakers whose work struggles to find support outside traditional studio systems and festival funding cycles.

Leading the slate is Birdsong – a found-footage horror film directed by Pam Miras (Medusae) and written by Glenn Barit (Cleaners), with Irene Villamor (The Loved One) on board as creative producer. The film follows an ornithologist who travels to a remote mountain in search of a mythical bird, while also seeking closure over her partner’s disappearance a decade earlier.

The project recently won the Kantana Sound Studio Asian Project Award at the Bangkok International Content Market 2026. “It’s our first time working with Pam Miras as a director, and it is in a genre that is male-dominated,” said Jadaone. “We really love the way Pam handles experimentation in her films.”

Ilaya Ilaya is also developing supernatural comedy Chandra Catacutan And The Curse Of The Fuchsia Moon, set to star Eugene Domingo (Sisa). The film is directed by Tim Rone Villanueva, whose credits include Child No. 82: Anak ni Boy Kana, which caught Jadaone’s attention when it screened Cinemalaya film festival last year.

Domingo plays the eldest daughter of a manananggal – a creature from Philippine folklore that can separate its upper torso from the lower part of its body. In Villanueva’s project, the children of the creature are reunited when she suffers a stroke mid-air and fails to return to her lower half. Jadaone says Villanueva’s work showed the kind of resourcefulness and pop culture fluency she wants Ilaya Ilaya to champion.

The slate also includes Crème de la Crème, a coming-of-age whodunnit to be directed by Irene Emma Villamor. Written by Glenn Barit from a story by Natts Jadaone, the film is partly inspired by a 2006 incident at Philippine Science High School in which two male students laced a classmate’s water jug with mercury nitrate, preventing her from attending the graduation march.

Jadaone herself is returning to directing with Boldstar, a dark comedy starring Angelica Panganiban (That Thing Called Tadhana) and produced by Bianca Balbuena (Sunshine, Filipiñana). The project won the CJ Entertainment Prize at the Asian Project Market in 2019 and was later selected for the Berlinale European Co-Production Market in 2020.

Balbuena said Boldstar emerged from the momentum of Jadaone’s 2020 film Fan Girl and a period of political anger over misogyny and the treatment of women in public life. After several delays, including Panganiban’s pregnancy, Jadaone’s work on Sunshine, and Balbuena’s leadership role at the now defunct Anima Studios, the team is now reviving the project.

“The project feels very ripe and momentous now, especially after Antoinette’s Crystal Bear win in Berlinale and sold-out local screenings of Sunshine,” said Balbuena.

Beyond film, Ilaya Ilaya is expanding into television, with Jadaone showrunning an as-yet-untitled romcom series for Netflix Philippines. Plot and casting details remain under wraps, but the project is co-written with Fatrick Tabada (Flower Girl), marking Jadaone’s return to the genre that helped establish her as a local favorite nearly a decade after Love You To The Stars And Back. Jadaone previously worked with Netflix on Replacing Chef Chico.

“We’re thrilled to partner again with Antoinette Jadaone, whose creative vision and signature ‘kilig’ storytelling have resonated with Filipino audiences everywhere,” said Vitto Lazatin, Director of Content at Netflix Philippines.

Rounding out the slate is an immersive stage adaptation of Sunshine, to be directed by Mikko Angeles (Bar Boys: The Musical) and written by Mika Regis (Unica Hijas), with Racal returning to the role in her stage debut.

The project is envisioned as a choose-your-own-adventure experience that places audiences inside Sunshine’s world, expanding the film’s questions around agency, complicity, and choice beyond the screen.

“When you’re watching a film, you’re there to just watch Sunshine make decisions,” said Jadaone. “But what if Sunshine’s story was something you could hold and influence as an audience member?”

Commenting on the slate overall, Jadaone said: “Before we were filmmakers, we were lovers of Philippine cinema. We want to be more intentional now about telling stories and working with people who demonstrate a genuine love for Philippine cinema.”

De Guzman added: “What I’m most looking forward to is being able to tell stories that we really believe in. Hopefully, through Ilaya Ilaya and the stories we make together, we can get more Filipinos to appreciate and fall in love with Philippine cinema.”

What can’t Julianne Moore do?

The U.S. actress accepted Zurich Film Festival‘s lifetime achievement honor, the Golden Icon Award, in perfect German on Friday night.

She was joined at the ceremony by Jesse Eisenberg, who directs her in his latest feature The Debut, a musical-comedy co-starring Paul Giamatti, which is screening at the 22nd edition in Switzerland this week.

Moore called upon her own childhood growing up in Europe while making her acceptance speech. “Thank you for this wonderful honor,” said a translated version of her words. “I know that I am in Switzerland right now, but as a teenager, I lived in Germany. And my teacher there told me that I could become an actress. Had I not moved to Europe with my parents, I would not have had this wonderful life. And I wouldn’t be here with you tonight to speak my bad German to you.”

On the carpet ahead of the presentation, the Oscar-winning actress beamed and said she was feeling “pretty good” about the prospect of receiving the prestigious Golden Icon. “And it’s really wonderful to be here with Jesse Eisenberg, who’s such a tremendous talent and has been an unbelievably wonderful creative partner,” she added. “He’s such a genius, so I’m just happy to be sharing this experience with him, and to be here with our movie. Every day was phenomenal. It really was. There’s actually a shot of me that Jesse said was so, so funny because I was making so many dumb faces. But I said, ‘That was just my dumb face!’ I was enjoying it so much.”

Eisenberg’s third directorial feature follows Mona Friedman (Moore), who is cast in a bit part at a small community theater and transforms from a shy, unassuming housewife into a zealous method actor willing to do anything to protect the artistic integrity of her marginal role — even if it means waging war against the show’s domineering director (Giamatti).

The filmmaker-actor-writer told reporters on the Zurich carpet on Friday: “Mona is me. When I was seven years old in New Jersey in 1990, I was a sad little kid, and then I joined a community theater and I found a home.” On the brilliance of Moore, who starred in Eisenberg’s directorial debut When You Finish Saving the World (2022), he said: “When I started writing it, it was only her, and if she did not want to do it, the movie would have not been made. There’s no one else on the planet, alive or dead or yet to be born, who could play [the role] as good as she [does].”

Among Moore’s best-known performances are Still Alice, for which she won the Academy Award, as well as The Hours and The Kids Are All Right. Recent credits include Apple TV’s Echo Valley, Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door and Netflix limited series Sirens. Next year, she will return to the stage to star in the title role of the Off-Broadway play Faydra.

Also on Friday night in Zurich, In Bruges and The Banshees of Inisherin filmmaker Martin McDonagh was given the fest’s A Tribute To… Award. The honor was in celebration of his most recent film, Wild Horse Nine, which is currently making its way around the festival circuit and already generating Oscar buzz, particularly for lead actor John Malkovich.

Set shortly before the 1973 military coup in Chile, Wild Horse Nine stars Malkovich and Sam Rockwell as Chris and Lee, longtime CIA partners stationed in Santiago who are dispatched to Easter Island by their bureau chief, MJ (Buscemi) to assist in the U.S.’s covert campaign to undermine the democratically elected Chilean government. Against the surreal backdrop of the island’s monumental Moai statues, the pair begin reckoning with their murky shared past.

“I love coming to Zurich, and it’s a tremendous honor,” said the British-Irish creative on the carpet ahead of his ceremony. “I’m excited. I know it’s a great, very cine-literate audience, so I hope they’ll like [Wild Horse Nine] as much as the other ones.”

He said about travelling to Easter Island: “I visited maybe 15 years ago, and was just struck by the beauty of the place, [and] also the mystery of the Moai heads, and I thought it could be almost a character in a film, and it’s turned out to be that way. I’d worked with Sam Rockwell obviously a bunch of times before, so that’s always a joy. But John Malkovich was new to me, and he’s just perfect for the part. He’s funny and he’s dangerous. And Steve Buscemi and Parker Posey were fantastic too.”

These aren’t the only awards Zurich is dishing out. Tom Hiddleston received the Golden Eye on Thursday night as the fest opened with his Everest drama, Tenzing, and John Turturro will also be given the same honor for his starring role in this year’s The Only Living Pickpocket in New York.

The 22nd Zurich Film Festival runs Sept. 24-Oct. 4.

On Friday nights, IndieWire After Dark honors fringe cinema in the streaming age with midnight movies from any moment in film history.

First, the BAIT: a weird genre pick, and why we’re exploring its specific niche right now. Then, the BITE: a spoiler-filled answer to the all-important question, “Is this old cult film actually worth recommending?”

The Bait: At Least Adult Swim Gave Me My Backstroke

I spend a lot of time hunched over my laptop. In fact, in the indie film world, my posture problem is so common it’s sometimes affectionately called a “programmer’s hunch.”

That’s the catchall term for the shape your spine gradually assumes when your every waking moment revolves around random screening links and unanswered emails. Of course, way before I was old enough to give myself such a genuinely stupid workplace injury, I developed a different back issue — equally rooted in my love for discovering strange media.

As an underage Adult Swim fan, I spent much of my 2000s childhood sneaking downstairs to watch the late-night Cartoon Network programming block hours after I’d been sent to bed. To avoid waking my parents and older sister, I kept the volume low and got as close to the TV set as possible.

Belly-down on the carpet with my back arched like “The Little Mermaid,” I was totally engrossed in what I was watching and physically incapable of relaxing for fear of being caught. Instead, adopting a kind of stress position that produced the s-curve that still impacts my structural integrity today, I felt every second of my most formative Adult Swim memories.

Naturally, being a sick freak, I totally loved it: finding joy and even identity in witnessing stuff I wasn’t “supposed” to see. The discomfort was part of the fun and, in its own way, made the risk worth it.

Earlier this month, my colleague Christian Zilko brought that feeling flooding back for me with his oral history of the cult platform. For Adult Swim’s 25th anniversary, IndieWire traced the scrappy and subversive sensibility that turned a ballsy experiment into one of TV’s most influential brands and, for folks like me, a meaningful ritual. It’s a rollicking good read and one of the rare times Hollywood execs sound sincerely cool. But the lineup’s iconic “Infomercials” do warrant a special After Dark side quest.

Kicked off in 2009, when I was then a teenager and actually allowed to enjoy myself after midnight, the “Infomercials” premise was extraordinarily simple. At 4 a.m., network viewers who were already accustomed to seeing lengthy advertisements for so-called miracle products and questionable self-help programs on TV were greeted with “paid” Adult Swim presentations that felt real but weren’t.

Innovative filmmakers, like Alan Resnick and Casper Kelly, used the bait-and-switch exhibition premise as an excuse to explore their arthouse ambitions and get very, very weird on broadcast.

You probably know “Too Many Cooks,” which begins as an innocuous sitcom opening but keeps adding credits, characters, and eventually a murderer. But here’s also “Unedited Footage of a Bear,” which sees a pharmaceutical ad curdle into a nightmare. And my personal favorite is still, “This House Has People in It,” which turns security footage into a sprawling suburban horror mystery.

Despite my newfound adolescent freedom in the early 2010s, I still remember watching these bizarre segments the same way I did as a child — laying down on the carpet, close enough to the TV to hear every nonsensical word. Thank God most of the “Informercials” shorts only run about 10 to 12 minutes.

There’s actually a wonderfully mundane reason for that breezy length. Adult Swim’s “Infomercials” were designed to fit just a quarter-hour television slot with room left over for commercials. Contextually, that’s just enough time to establish what you think you’re watching and then make you regret settling in.

Some “Infomercials” are funnier than others, and plenty show little interest in being funny at all. What they share, however, is the uncanny ability to make the machinery of TV feel existentially unstable. So, in honor of Adult Swim turning 25, I’m recommending you end Cartoon Network’s month-long celebration with an “Infomercials” marathon, sure to be both nostalgic and upsetting!

Watch a few you’ve never heard of (on YouTube or the official Adult Swim site), and resist the urge to read the descriptions first. If your back can take it, get close to the screen, too. I’ll do the same. Probably. —Alison Foreman

The Bite: May the Kids Never Get Back in the Pool

I’ve spent a lot of September thinking about Adult Swim. It’s the 25th anniversary of an entertainment brand that means more to me than almost any other and, as Ali was gracious enough to plug, I wrote a few articles trying to capture what it’s all meant to the people who made it.

There’s so much to discuss — the unique shows, the talent it platformed, the fanbase that it cultivated — but to me it all comes down to a simple question: what is Adult Swim? And there’s no better way to answer it than by watching some Infomercials.

Adult Swim isn’t just a programming block, even if it’s been a great one that eventually surpassed that children’s programming it was designed to supplement. It isn’t just a tight-knit group of people, even if many of them continue to closely collaborate after 25 years of making cartoons in Atlanta together.

It’s not just a style of comedy, even if terms like “Adult Swim humor” are universally recognized pieces of our pop culture vocabulary, even when they’re used to describe shows made by other companies. And it feels like a cop out to say that Adult Swim is a vibe, even if that feels like the fairest answer I could give.

More than anything, Adult Swim is a celebration of the element of surprise. It shocked viewers who kept the Cartoon Network on too late and were ushered into maturity by the “Family Guy” reruns they saw at too young of an age. It shocked older animation enthusiasts who never thought they’d see Shaggy and Scooby on trial for marijuana possession or Space Ghost hosting his own talk show. And it shocked many of us who spent countless hour watching cable in the middle of the night, never being quite sure what weirdness would air next.

That’s the beauty of the Infomercials, and it’s why Adult Swim was the perfect platform for geniuses like Alan Resnick and Casper Kelly. Watching a cheesy sitcom opening turn into a bloody field day for a time-traveling serial killer or unedited footage of a bear turn into a pharmaceutical nightmare is the ultimate expression of that unapologetic commitment to keeping us on our toes.

For such a small programming block, Adult Swim had a massive, outsized influence on creating the shared language that we’ve come to recognize as “internet humor.” The surrealism, pastiches of existing media, and willingness to put dark spins on familiar pieces of nostalgia are immediately recognizable to anyone chronically online, even if you never watched “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” late at night. It’s also why I wonder if Adult Swim inadvertently helped create a future that it won’t have much of a part in.

So much of its brilliance was the advantage that it had over the viewer, being able to show you anything it wanted while you sat there captive. I’m not sure that it’s possible to recreate that feeling in this age of endless content. Maybe that’s not even a bad thing — maybe we need a few less surprises while we catch our breath — but it’s absolutely cause to take an evening to celebrate the incredible artistic accomplishment that the first quarter century of Adult Swim represents. And no matter what the next iteration looks like, I’ll be watching. —Christian Zilko

Read more installments of After Dark, IndieWire’s midnight movie club: