As FiliFest turns 3, I can't help but reflect on how much we've come since January 30th, 2019. I still remember our first meeting that Wednesday afternoon, starry-eyed and full of excitement, but we also knew there was a possibility this would all remain just in writing or as a vision burried in our dreams.
Fast forward to today and I'm proud to say, FiliFest is now legally a Community Interest Company (FiliFest CIC), with 25 members creating digital and physical events for our community. Currently, we're planning our THIRD festival and are working to collaborate with as many Filipino societies as possible!
But this is now, how about in the last year?
We started off the last 6 months with FiliFest's incorporation as a CIC Limited by Guarantee. I remember receiving the notification of the incorporation whilst I was on holiday in America last year - perhaps one of my highlights of the year!
September was our first time working with a charity (in fact multiple charities!). We thoroughly enjoyed organising and helping out at the Time To Dance event for the Our Place Is Here residency, in support of Filipino domestic migrant workers. We had fun learning the choreography to Zoom by Jessie and creating TikToks with the migrant workers! Check out our highlights below:
And of course for September we had to bring back Freshers with FiliFest! Personally my favourite part about this event was the marketing. I thought it was just so cute and fitting with the theme! Kudos to our Marketing and Logistics Team for bringing 15 global Filipino societies and students together at the start of the academic year!
Now as a fashion enthusiast, I obviously cannot forget about the lookbooks released this year. Our committee really have great fashion sense - check out one of them below!
We are truly grateful to have worked with TFC again this year to promote the 1MX London 2022 Festival. This is the first Filipino music festival in Europe!! And as a fan of particularly KZ Tandingnan and Bamboo, this was a dream come true!
Last year our annual OPM Competition was delayed to a shorter event after the Christmas period. As excited as we were for this event, there were unforeseen circumstances which made the timing too difficult for us to do. But thankfully we were still able to complete this event and congratulations to our winner Jonas Bernardo! Hopefully we meet your at the festival!!
We know the popularity of our infographics, so I was also really pleased with how we brought this back this year - check out our most recent one on Chinese New Year in the Philippines Post!
And I think this catches us up to today! Right now FiliFest is busy planning our annual festival. We'd like for this to be bigger and better than our last two festivals, so we are really working hard for this. We hope to see you this June!