Queer East Film Festival Reveals Full 2023 Programme

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Queer East returns to cinemas across London 18th to 30th April with another handpicked selection of LGBTQ+ films from Asia. This year’s edition has a special focus on Korea including a series of films spanning from the 1960s to the present day and will also feature screenings of classics The Love Eterne and Rebels of the Neon God. Opening with Philippine comedy I Love You, Beksman, the festival will close with Home Ground, a documentary focussing on the first openly lesbian bar in Korea which opened in the 1990s.

Cambodia

  • Lotus Sports Club – documentary filmed over five years following a trans man in his 60s who formed a football team for LGBTQ+ youth.

China

  • Bad Women of China – He Xiaopei’s personal documentary explores the lives of Chinese women from the 1920s to the present day through the stories of herself, her mother, and her daughter.

Hong Kong

  • The Love Eterne – classic Mandarin-language Shaw Brothers musical directed by the legendary Li Han-Hsiang and starring Betty Loh Ti as a young woman who dresses as a boy in order to pursue education and meets a dashing scholar with whom she falls in love (Ivy Ling Po).

Japan

  • Let Me Hear It Barefoot – two alienated young men struggle to identify their feelings while searching for escape from moribund small-town Japan in Riho Kudo’s indie drama. Review.

Myanmar

Philippines

  • About Us But Not About Us – experimental mystery drama in which a student’s dinner with a professor takes an unexpected turn.
  • I Love You, Beksman – comedy starring Christian Bables (Big Night!) as a hairdresser everyone assumes to be gay until he falls for a beauty queen.

South Korea

  • Home Ground – documentary focussing on the first openly lesbian bar in Korea.
  • House of Hummingbird – coming of age drama set in 1994 in which a lonely teenage girl develops a fondness for her enigmatic Chinese teacher. Review.
  • King and the Clown – 2005 drama in which a pair of street performers become embroiled in dangerous intrigue. Screening on 35mm.
  • A Man and a Gisaeng – 1969 comedy in which an office worker is fired for being unmanly and finds a new line of work as a gisaeng only to be courted by the very boss who fired him.
  • Memento Mori – classic millennial horror in which a high school girl discovers a forbidden romance after reading a schoolmate’s diary.
  • Peafowl – drama following a trans woman who is tasked with performing the memorial dance at her estranged father’s funeral.
  • Sa Bangji – 1989 period drama in which an intersex person living in a temple draws dangerously close to a widow in mourning.
  • Stateless Things – festival favourite from 2011 following a North Korean refugee and a young gay man financially dependent on his older lover.

Taiwan

  • Rebels of the Neon God – classic from Tsai Ming-Liang following alienated teenager Hsiao Kang (Lee Kang-sheng) and petty delinquent Ah-Tze in a changing Taipei.

Shorts

In Between Seasons

  • Boy Queen (Dir. Sai Nyi Min Htut, Myanmar, Germany, 2021)
  • Seance of the Past (Dir. Adelaide Sherry, Singapore, 2022)
  • Truthless (Dir. Zhao Badou, China, 2021)
  • Memori Dia (Dir. Asarela Orchidia Dewi, Indonesia, Germany, 2022)
  • Tank Fairy (Dir. Erich Rettstadt, Taiwan, US, 2022)

All About My Mother

  • Will You Look at Me (Dir. Huang Shuli, China, 2022)
  • Skin Can Breathe (Dir. Chheangkea, US, Cambodia, 2022)
  • Fictions (Dir. Alice Charlie Liu, Canada, 2022)
  • Rising Sun (Dir. Cheng Ya-chih, Taiwan, 2018)
  • Fishbowl (Dir. Jacqueline Chan, US, 2021)
  • A Good Mother (Dir. Lee Yu-jin, South Korea, 2022)

A Kind of Queer Utopia

  • Strangers in Paradise (Dir. Huang Yihong, China, 2022)
  • Adju (Dir. Elvis A-Liang Lu, Taiwan, 2021)
  • Leo & Nymphia (Dir. Pan Hsin-An, Taiwan, 2021)
  • The Choir of our Kind (Dir. Xu Zai, Wang Sisi, China, 2021)

First Times

  • The Voice (Dir. Maral Ayurzana, Mongolia, 2022)
  • Swimming in the Dark (Dir. Chen Pin-Ru, Taiwan, 2022)
  • I get so sad sometimes (Dir. Trishtan Perez, Philippines, 2021)
  • Rooted (Dir. Wu Yi-Wei, Taiwan, 2022)
  • We Were Never Really Strangers (Dir. Patrick Pangan, Philippines, 2022)

Queer Korea: A Mixtape

  • Ice (Dir. Lee Seongpwook, South Korea, 2019)
  • Cicada (Dir. Yoon Dae-woen, South Korea, 2021)
  • Butch Up! (Dir. Lee Yu-jin, South Korea, 2022)
  • Don’t worry (Dir. Kim Tae-yong, South Korea, 2022)
  • How Do I Kill That B? – (Seo Ji-hwan, South Korea, 2022)

Dance Performances

  • HAU2 – Tanzplattform 2022

Artists’ Moving Image Programmes

Alien Body, Human Dreams

  • to boyhood, i never knew him (Dir. Trâm Anh Nguyễn, Vietnam & Canada, 2022)
  • Longing for the Sun to Set Upwards (Dir. Jao San Pedro, Philippines, 2022)
  • Native beast (Dir. Aileen Ye, Netherlands, 2022)
  • Disease of Manifestation (Dir. Tzu An Wu, Taiwan, 2011)
  • Yummy Body Truck (Dir. Noam Youngrak Son, Netherlands, 2021)
  • BXBY (Dir. Soojin Chang, UK, 2022)
  • Garden Amidst the Flame (Natasha Tontey, Indonesia, 2022)

Wayward Fruits

  • Dikit (Dir. Gabriela Serrano, 2021)
  • out in the world (Dir. Bart Seng Wen Long, 2022)
  • Boy-Taste (Dir. Michio Okabe, 1973)
  • I shudder with pleasure that at last the time has come (Dir. Mari Terashima, 2022)
  • Sexy Sushi (Dir. Calleen Koh, 2021)
  • Super Taboo (Dir. Su Hui Yu, 2017)

Queer East runs 18th to 30th April at venues across Central London while a selection of films will also tour to venues around the UK in the autumn. Full details for all the films as well as ticketing links can be found on the official website, while you can also keep up with all the latest news by following Queer East on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.