43° TFF - The Garden of the Earthly Delights by Morgan Knibbe (Olanda/Filippine, 2025)

Planet Claire
6 days ago
4 min read

running time: 123' Winner of the Best Feature Film Award at the 43rd TFF

Review by Clara Bruno - 30 November 2025

reading time: four minutes

Film viewed at TFF – Cinema Romano 2

29 November 2025

The film, presented at the 43rd Torino Film Festival and awarded Best Feature Film, tells a contemporary story set in the shantytowns of Manila, Philippines, where two very young orphans struggle to survive amidst social decay. Child prostitution, drugs, and despair are part of their everyday lives. The siblings try to save enough money to escape the corruption and poverty of their world and reach Denmark, a dream that seems constantly out of reach.

The film’s title, The Garden of Earthly Delights, recalls the painting attributed to Hieronymus Bosch, the Dutch painter of the late 15th century in the Northern Renaissance tradition. The work, a large triptych four metres wide (which I saw on display at the Palazzo Reale Museum in Milan in 2023), is a moral allegory. On the left, the scene of Paradise with God, Adam, and Eve. In the centre, a fantastical, unreal world populated by nude human and animal figures, enormous fruits, strange creatures, and sensual scenes. This is the “garden of earthly delights,” the realm of temptation, pleasure, and carnal life. The right panel depicts Hell, with punishments, monsters, and suffering: the consequence of sin and human vices.

Filming Vulnerable Lives Without Resorting to Spectacle

The young Dutch director recounts the genesis of his first feature film, The Garden of Earthly Delights, a work he describes as both emotionally overwhelming and, at the same time, a formal experiment. In Knibbe, an ethics of the gaze emerges, rooted in an inner reflection on what it means to represent vulnerable lives without succumbing to the rhetoric of spectacle. The roots of the project lie in both biography and history. Knibbe carries a family memory linked to colonial Indonesia, which has given him a sensitivity to the unresolved wounds of colonialism in Asia. This awareness intersected with direct experience: while working as director of photography on a documentary about street children in Manila, he encountered adolescents marked by poverty, abuse, and addiction, yet also possessing an unexpected capacity for resilience. From this lived experience arises the character of Ginto, the film’s young protagonist. Telling the stories of those living on the margins is risky territory: the filmmaker fears a distorting representation or, worse, a form of exoticisation, as has been seen in too many films when a Western gaze enters a world so distant from its own. To avoid such pitfalls, preparing the film became a long anthropological process: consultations with local communities, involvement of local actors and crew, and careful work to build mutual trust. This is not “realism” per se, but a responsibility of storytelling.

The narrative material condenses around a network of structural violence. Knibbe shows misery and exploitation not as isolated phenomena; he identifies in colonial legacies, global capitalism, sex tourism, and economic inequality an interconnected system of power. The film invites viewers to observe how these forces quietly shape individual and collective destinies. Even the character of the abusive Western tourist avoids personifying the “monster”: Knibbe prefers to portray him as a tormented individual, a human cog in a larger machine, so that responsibility is not reduced to the convenient condemnation of a single person.

Visual Approach

Visually, The Garden of Earthly Delights treads a line between realism and lyricism. The streets of Manila, the shantytowns, the forgotten districts become the setting for a raw immersion, but the film also offers a poetic dimension: dreams, visions, precolonial symbols, and local musical vibrations. Beauty here is unsettling rather than consoling. Knibbe shows that aesthetics is not a veneer but a means of bringing forth the dignity, spirituality, and resilience that survive even in daily brutality.

Casting Choices

The director entrusts the main roles to young people who have personally experienced the world depicted in the film. He exercises careful attention when filming scenes, with constant support figures present and a rigorous focus on the emotional safety of the young non-professional actors. In this case, fiction is not an artifice but a pact: a protected space where truth can emerge without harm.

The protagonists, some of whom attended the Torino festival, are:

JP Rodriguez (born 2008) as eleven-year-old Ginto

Francesca Dela Cruz as his sister Asia

Bunny Cadag, a Filipino transfeminine actor, as Beyoncé

John Michael Toling as Jojo, Ginto’s friend

Benjamin Moen as the Dutch tourist

The music, beautiful and highly fitting, is by composers Jose Antonio Buencamino and Mo’ong Pribadi.

Cinematography is by the acclaimed Dutch director of photography Frank van den Eeden.

Knibbe’s transition from documentary to fiction is not a break but a continuity: with this first feature, he finds in fiction the most suitable tool to explore post-colonial reality in the Philippines, freeing himself from the constraints of observation and opening a path to symbolic construction. Cinema, in his vision, is not just image but relationship: an encounter between the filmmaker, the filmed, and the viewer.

At the core of his reflection is the role of art: for Knibbe, cinema is a form of responsibility, a means to give voice to the ignored, to shake the viewer, and to prompt reflection on one’s place within global power structures. The Garden of Earthly Delights offers no easy answers in giving voice to the voiceless. Morgan Knibbe is a young filmmaker who, aware of the limits of representation, chooses to cross them and assert the right and duty to look.

Before its TFF screening, the film was presented in the Netherlands in March 2025 at the Movies that Matter Film Festival and in November in the Philippines at the QCinema International Film Festival.

Morgan Knibbe Filmography

A Twist in the Fabric of Space (2012), experimental short
Shipwreck (2014), short film awarded at the Locarno Festival
Those Who Feel the Fire Burning (2014), feature-length documentary
The Atomic Soldiers (2018), documentary short recounting testimonies of the few survivors of US nuclear tests in the Pacific in the 1950s
What Does a Nuclear Explosion Feel Like? (2018), viral video/documentary with millions of views
Human Playground (2022), documentary series on sport worldwide, directed by Knibbe in selected episodes
The Garden of Earthly Delights (2025), feature-length fiction film