The Water We Swim In
2024 · 20m · Philippines
Directed by Diana Galang
Genres: drama, sports, thriller
Tones: contemplative, provocative, tense
After a crushing losing streak, swim coach Agatha Martinez — a former champion — is forced to step away from her young team, the Betta Warriors, and must reclaim them from a patriarchal swimming league before her students drown in toxic masculinity.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise wants to be provocative — toxic masculinity in youth sports, a Filipina coach reclaiming her team — but it plays it too straight, too much a thesis wrapped in sports-drama beats that other people made work decades ago.
Galang situates this firmly in the tradition of socially conscious sports cinema, and the formal control is evident: the tension between institutional power and individual agency hums through the editing and sound design with real intention.
There's a single moment where Agatha watches her students from outside the pool — not coaching, just witnessing — and the entire film's argument about presence and authority reorganizes itself through that stillness, the choice to let the frame do the gendered politics rather than declare them.
Festivals
- CinemaSHORT Asian Short Film Competition 2025
- Sorok Short Film Festival 2024