RVA’s International Short Film Contest Awards: “Patapon” Calls for Return to Oneself

Patapon is a small film with a long echo. In just 4 minutes and 21 seconds, Alfie Aure places before us a young man who feels spent, hollowed out by expectations, drifting not only from people but from himself, from faith, from the earth beneath his feet. It feels painfully familiar, and that is precisely where its grace begins.

Care for creation here is not a slogan but a wound. The protagonist cannot bend down to the soil because he has forgotten how to bow, before God, before himself, before the fragile world entrusted to him. And yet, as the film gently suggests, it is never too late. God’s timing is not the ticking tyranny of chronos, but the surprising mercy of kairos, the moment when grace breaks into monotony. Even exhaustion can become a threshold.

Paul’s theology hums quietly in the background: “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit?” (1 Cor 6:19). Patapon takes this seriously. If I dare to bow before my Creator, I must also learn to bow before my own dignity, and before creation itself, all of which belongs to Him. Ecological conversion, the film insists, begins with inner reverence. One cannot heal the earth with a fractured sense of self.

What makes Patapon compelling is its restraint. A simple encounter, a fleeting interruption, becomes sacramental, a sign that God still waits, still initiates, still believes in our capacity to begin again. The healing of creation does not start with grand gestures, but with awareness, with returning to oneself.

That this film is conceived, shot, edited, and designed almost entirely by a one-man team, Alfie Aure, only deepens its authenticity. With a sensitive performance by Jomar Tañesa and minimal yet evocative sound design, Patapon feels intimate, prayerful, and honest.

Watch it not for answers, but for awakening. Sometimes, the smallest films arrive exactly at the right time.