Queer East, now in its fifth year, is a film festival that focuses on LGBTQ+ stories from East Asia, Southeast Asia and their diaspora communities. It aims to challenge conventions and stereotypes, giving audiences an opportunity to explore the contemporary queer landscape across East and Southeast Asia. And it serves as a platform that nurtures dialogue on the multifaceted understandings of what it means to be Asian and queer today.
Following on from the main festival in London, Queer East Festival: On the Road is bringing a programme of films on a nationwide tour this autumn – including the Showroom here in Sheffield.
Sheffield programme:
Love Bound + Q&A
9 November, 6pm
Shanshan Chen integrates animation and anecdotes in her documentary centering on the journey of Qiuyan Chen who became an unexpected celebrity after suing the Chinese Government over homophobic textbooks. After moving to the UK to escape her suffocating family and government pressure, her life takes an unexpected turn when she meets Bling who has to return to China. Determined to reunite and build a life together, Qiuyan embarks on a challenging journey to bring Bling back to the UK.
Asog
14 November. 6pm
Incorporating documentary and fictional elements, this screwball tragicomedy stars a cast of real-life survivors of Super Typhoon Yolanda, focusing on Jaya, a non-binary schoolteacher and comedian who travels across the Philippines in the hopes of winning a beauty pageant, with Adam McKay (Succession, The Big Short) and Alan Cumming (The Good Wife, Goldeneye) serving as executive producers.
Bye Bye Love – 50th anniversary screening
16 November, 6pm
Until the discovery of a film negative in a warehouse in 2018, Bye Bye Love was long considered lost, but this new print gives audiences a rare chance to revisit this radical work of 1970s Japanese cinema, which recalls the 1969 queer classic Funeral Parade of Roses. Following two young people, Utamaro and Giko, on a doomed summer road trip through Japan, this poetic, surreal work reflects on the dissipating promise of 1960s counterculture and free love, transcending gender, sexuality and the body. With a blend of stylistic influences from the French New Wave and American New Cinema along with a rethinking of Japanese artistic traditions, conventional understandings are challenged through a queer lens, adding to the political charge of this rediscovered classic.
The River
21 November, 6pm
Tsai Ming-liang is one of the most celebrated Second New Wave film directors of Taiwanese cinema and his shockingly subversive 1997 family drama centres around the disintegration of a troubled family after a young man is suddenly struck by debilitating neck pain. Shot in Tsai’s signature minimalist style and starring his muse Lee Kang-Sheng, who has appeared in many of Tsai’s groundbreaking films including Rebels of the Neon God and Good Bye, Dragon Inn, this controversial work confirmed the director’s place as a uniquely rebellious voice in LGBTQ+ cinema, offering a sly, queer critique of the nuclear family and the values it represents.
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