Titled after Natalie Diaz’s 2020 poem, The First Water is the Body is a program of queer Filipino short films whose intimacies are tied to images of water and its mutability. These shorts tackle false dichotomoies queer people learn to outgrow—between love and loss, labor and exploitation, selfhood and community, submission and resistance. Quiet yet audacious, the program traces queer temporalities, mutable identities, and unrealized futures. It renders transparent the bodies that hold these invisible longings and fears, revealing how life demands us to become like water: at once life-giving and perilous, unpredictable and uncontainable. - Jason Tan Liwag