Hey London, if you’re a cinephile, this one’s for you. From April 23 to May 17, a new edition of Queer East Festival is taking over multiple cinemas and venues in the city, including The Barbican BFI Southbank, ICA London, and Rio Cinema. With a programme highlighting the best of LGBTQ+ Asian cinema in recent years, you’ll be able to watch hundreds of feature films and shorts, as well as attend art exhibitions and talks about literature.
Born in 2020 “in response to the systemic lack of queer Asian representation in the arts, cinema, onstage, and behind the scenes,” as they explain, Queer East Festival has established itself as a powerful platform for voices that are often ignored or relegated to the margins. As Yi Wang, the festival director, states, “The richness of Asian and queer communities forms a vital part of the UK’s identity. Over the past six years, Queer East has forged a space for bold, alternative, and multifaceted expressions of artistic queerness.”
These “expressions of artistic queerness” that Yi Wang mentions expand beyond the silver screen and now include theatre, performance, literature, and the visual arts. For example, on April 26, Queercircle will open a group show titled { guttural },,,{ fleshless }, curated by Aki Hassan and april forrest lin 林森, with participating artists like painters Bontyanak and Oscar Chan Yik Long, speculative game-maker Dri Chiu Tattersfield, and performers Clarinda Tse and Zulaa.
For those of you who want to delve into literature, Queer East Festival introduces a new programme with talks from author Xuanlin Tham on their recent book, Revolutionary Desires, and Chi Ta-Wei on his 1995 queer sci-fi novel The Membranes. Also, for this year’s sixth edition, Queer East teams up with Scotland’s leading queer film festival, SQIFF, to showcase Scottish-Asian filmmakers. The geographic reach also broadens thanks to Beyond, a new section dedicated to Central and South Asia.
The programme is extremely vast and comprises several decades, from the 1960s to present day, showcasing how queer Asian filmmakers have been portraying the LGBTQ+ community throughout societal and historic changes. Highlights include Crazy Love (Michio Okabe, 1968), an avant-garde cult classic documenting the radical spirit of Japan’s creative and artistic scene in Shinjuku in the 1960s, and We Are Here, (Zhao Jing, Shi Tou, 2015), a heartfelt documentary on lesbian advocacy. The festival’s opening event at BFI will see the UK premiere of historical epic Kubi (Takeshi Kitano, 2023), and the closing screening at ICA will be the UK premiere of South Korean transgender documentary, Edhi Alice (Ilrhan Kim, 2024).
When the cloud catches colours
Run! Dorothy! Run! 桃乐丝快跑 (Shen Jinghao, 2023)
aWokening
Crazy Love
We are here
We *KNEAD* to talk (Nandal Seo, 2024)
