Category: LGBTQ+

Fruit Gathering (သစ်သီးခူး, Aung Phyoe, 2026)

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A young factory worker becomes infatuated with a new hire, but can never be sure if their friendship is genuine or essentially transactional in Aung Phyoe’s sensitive drama, Fruit Gathering (သစ်သီးခူး). San Kyi’s (Nandar Myat Aung) life is in many ways defined by risk aversion. While the consequences of speaking her feelings may be severe in a culture in which such relationships are not fully accepted, she is also hemmed in by financial precarity and the fear of losing her job while finding work in Yangon proves increasingly difficult with an influx of those of fleeing violence and destruction in the countryside seeking employment in the city.

This might be one reason she continues to idolise her rural childhood as symbolised by the idea of fruit picking while one of many migrating to the city in search of work in the wake of her father’s abandonment. San Kyi’s mother has already sold their farm to fund her business as a labour broker helping workers find positions abroad and now wants to sell their family’s home much to the grandmother’s disappointment. Still living with her mother and grandmother, San Kyi also sees her job as a seamstress in a textile factory as a path to freedom and independence even if her mother looks down on her occupation and she’s relentlessly oppressed and exploited at work.

In fact, she first meets Theint (Nandar Myint Lwin) while being berated by the forewoman who accuses her of having taken an unauthorised bathroom break. Theint lies and says she saw her talking to her supervisor, signalling both a rebellious streak and also a casual disregard for her employment prospects which stand in stark contrast to San Kyi’s caution. San Kyi refuses to sign the other women’s petition for better working conditions out of fear of losing her job, setting her at odds with her colleagues in effectively siding with management and sabotaging their chances of gaining fair treatment. While her colleague insists they should fight for their rights, San Kyi would rather stay quiet.

Her caution is reflected in her unspoken longing for Theint, though the extent to which Theint may return these feelings is never quite clear. She appears to exploit San Kyi’s feelings for her in asking to borrow a large sum of money she says is for her mother in the country but perhaps not actually planning to pay her back. Theint abruptly drops out of contact, only to explain that she’s married a man and has to follow him to the rubber plantation where he works. When Theint’s husband finds work abroad, it provides a temporary haven of togetherness and a new sense of possibility for San Kyi who begins to dream that the two of them might be able to build new lives together in another country as migrant workers. 

Theint, however, repeatedly tells her to stop dreaming and be more realistic. She does not appear to believe in the kind of better future that San Kyi clings to and all her decisions are motivated by financial survival. Theint takes advantage of her connections with San Kyi’s mother and the taxi driver she wants her daughter to marry leading to a hilarious misunderstanding as her mother accuses San Kyi of being “jealous” of Theint, suddenly staking a claim on the taxi driver whose currency has risen now another woman has shown an interest little knowing that the reverse is true. Even her mother’s attempts to marry San Kyi off have a transactional quality in being motivated by her own desire for financial gain in no longer wanting to live with her daughter.

To that extent, San Kyi’s longing takes on a purer quality but equally as the film implies is rendered impossible in the world in which she lives in which love is a luxury few can afford. Gradually, she begins to turn her rage inward, sabotaging her relationship with Theint due to her jealously and insecurity and injuring herself at work while preoccupied about her love her life. Romantic and economic freedoms go hand in hand, while San Kyi continues to pine for an idealised pastorality outside of the city in the place where she grew up. Nevertheless, her life seems to improve after separating from her mother, getting a new job, and meeting new people even if her love for Theint lingers as an unresolved memory. The film’s boxy 4:3 ratio echoes the ways in which San Kyi is continually constrained, able to find true release only in pastoral fantasy and ancient ritual.

Fruit Gathering screens 14th/15th October as part of this year’s BFI London Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

My Name Ain’t Suzie (花街時代, Angie Chen, 1985)

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Angie Chen’s response to The World of Suzie Wong, My Name Ain’t Suzie (花街時代) opens in the present day with its heroine apparently a gothic mystery, a Miss Havisham-style recluse and ghost of old Hong Kong trapped within the apartment of a legendary madam from old Shanghai. This conception of her turns out to be something of a myth in itself, as accidental witness to history Dick recounts to a young man working as a delivery boy (Jacky Yeung Tak-Ngai) for his ever evolving chip shop that she is actually still a wildly successful restauranteur and fixture in the local nightclub scene. 

This small enclave of Wan Chai, however, seems to have become a kind of ghost town having been largely abandoned as the American sailors who were once its main clientele stopped coming after the twin waves of the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Shui Mei (Pat Ha Man-Jik) now owns this block which signals her eventual mastery over the world in which she lives, if also her loneliness and isolation, occasionally staying in Miss Xiao’s (Angela Yu Chien) old apartment as if unable to let go of the irresolvable past. Her story is then, at least in part, a chronicle of the nation’s own post-war history as she successfully adapts to the times, yet retains a sense of melancholy nostalgia for an older Hong Kong which is fast disappearing as the Handover looms closer.

Indeed, Shui Mei’s life begins in an impoverished fishing village which is set a stir by the return of Monroe, a seemingly glamorous woman dressed in the latest fashions and handing out sticks of gum to the awestruck locals. Sex work is seen as a pathway out of poverty and towards the new modern society that Monroe represents. Having been raped by three local boys, it is also in a way Shui Mei’s means of rejecting her victimisation and asserting full ownership over her body even if, in other ways, she is exploited by brothel owner Miss Xiao, herself an exile who fled to Hong Kong from the formerly glamorous and sophisticated international centre that was Shanghai.

While working as a bar girl in Wan Chai, Shui Mei falls for Miss Xiao’s adopted son, Jimmy, on whom she has a quasi-incestuous fixation. Rather than casting an actor already under contract to Shaw Brothers, Chen cast a then unknown Anthony Wong, billed under the name Anthony Perry, through extensive auditions largely for the similarities he shared with the role. Like Jimmy, Wong was abandoned as a small child by his father, a British colonial official who already had a wife and children in the UK with whom he later emigrated to Australia. Jimmy’s idolisation of Hollywood icon James Dean and desperate search for his biological father, an American seaman, are symbolic of the search for cultural identity in a Hong Kong caught between a series of colonial influences while denied the kind of mastery over itself that Shui Mei eventually achieves.

Shui Mei’s relationship with Jimmy causes a rift with Miss Xiao that leads to her exile from Wan Chai, though Jimmy proves to be a faithless lover. After years of boasting of the revenge he’ll take for his mother’s suicide when he finds his father, Jimmy is seduced by promises of American wealth and comfort and accepts his invitation to return with him to the US, callously abandoning Shui Mei. Years later, when he returns with his two young sons, he has become in some ways very much Americanised. He complains that his first wife lacked a strong work ethic while having adopted an orientalist idea of the submissive hometown wife who will work hard in his business and raise his children. Though still resentful over her abandonment, Shui Mei harbours a lingering desire to rekindle the romance of her youth only to be cruelly disillusioned. Jimmy has forgotten her. He has not come back for Shui Mei, but is clearly in the market for a much younger woman, eventually marrying one of Shui Mei’s proteges at the bar she has opened in another part of the city after saving money made through temporarily working as a streetwalker.

This does, however, reinforce the idea that Shui Mei cannot rely on a man to save her but only on herself and female solidarity. When her new bar is targeted by triads, she enters a partnership with Sister Ying (Deanie Ip Tak-Han), the former wife of a gang boss who has pull in the underworld and a habit of chasing off gangsters with meat cleavers. Though the relationship is heavily implied as both a romantic and business partnership of equals, Shui Mei does not quite accept its validity due its same sex nature and wonders if she can really stay with Ying forever while tempted by the prospect of a more conventional, heterosexual union with Jimmy along with an easy life in America having run herself ragged creating a business empire and suffering the physical affects of a violent triad attack.

Though the end of her story may seem sad, Dick explains to his young delivery boy that Shui Mei refused to be beaten and got back up again each time she was knocked down, which perhaps provides a more positive prognosis in the shadow of the Handover. In one sense, she may have become a ghost of old Hong Kong as her silhouette now appears at Miss Xiao’s window, but may otherwise have avoided her fate. Despite their falling-out, an ageing Shui Mei returned to care for Miss Xiao who unlike her had been left behind by changing times, abandoned by all including her adopted son Jimmy who returns only after her death following many years of estrangement. Though Shui Mei may be consumed by an irresolvable nostalgia, like the nation itself she has progressed from her life in the impoverished fishing village to become an economic powerhouse while achieving total mastery over herself as an independent woman.

My Name Ain’t Suzie screened as part of Hong Kong Film Fest UK.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Immortal Story (海上花, Yonfan, 1986)

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A young woman dreams of romance after meeting a Japanese boy in Macau, but finds that fate has other plans in Yonfan’s romantic melodrama, Immortal Story (海上花). Employing a non-linear narrative, the film opens in the early 1970s and shifts back 10 years as Ling (Sylvia Chang Ai-Chia) meets Nakamura (Tsurumi Shingo) who is in town for a few days while his school baseball team has a fixture in Hong Kong. Though the pair are smitten with each other, Ling never sends the letters she promised to write him, realising that she is corresponding with a romantic fantasy rather than a real person, while Nakamura apparently continues to think of her after returning to Japan.

Ten years later, Ling is discovered cradling Nakamura’s body in a hotel room in Macau and is presumed to have stabbed him with a fruit knife. The film then explores what led to this tragic ending through a series of flashbacks and witness testimonies through which it becomes apparent that both Ling and Nakamura have become somehow corrupted during their time apart. Even during her youth, however, it seems that Ling did not really believe in the reality of romantic salvation and was too afraid to pursue her relationship with Nakamura. After all, she could easily have sent the letters that she continued to write for the full 10 years, but preferred to maintain the fantasy rather than risk it shattering.

Instead, she drifted into an abusive relationship with a local boy who got her pregnant and then dumped her, after which she was rescued by bar owner/madam, Blanche (Yiu Wai). If Ling is caught in a romantic fantasy, then so in a way Blanche is too as it is clear that she is infatuated with Ling who will never return her affections. In fact, when Ling reveals that she plans to leave with Nakamura, she says that she feels indebted to Blanche but also that she has effectively repaid her kindness through the money she has made working for her as an escort. This is in a way Blanche’s tragedy, that in seeking to trap and possess Ling, she ends up ruining her while Ling feels only gratitude rather than affection. To escape the trauma of her life as a sex worker, she ends up turning to drugs from which neither Blanche nor Nakamura is able to save her.

What exactly happened to Nakamura in the intervening 10 years is never revealed, but it seems that he has ironically become involved with the drugs trade and is therefore partly responsible for Ling’s fate. He vows that he will get her off the drugs and take her back to Japan with him, but agrees to help her inject not only after they first reconnect but when they meet again in the hotel room before they’re supposed to leave. Blanche isn’t wrong when she accuses him of feeding on the blood of vulnerable people, though one could say she does the same in pressing them into sex work as she does with Ling. Unsurprisingly, Blanche is against Ling reuniting with Nakamura, but also asks why she allows men to hurt her, rather than accept the care and nurture Blanche is giving her if while, at the same time, harming her through her exploitation. 

The 1970s setting maybe crucial to making the timeline work as Nakamura states the reason he can speak Chinese is that he was born in China, though this “immortal story” feels like something that might have happened much earlier. There is a strong sense of nostalgia for a lost time of innocence and possibility, though Ling already seems to think that her future is out of reach even as a teen. When she reunites with Nakamura, it’s in a ruined building where she once used to live that is about to be torn down, hinting both that their romance has no real future and that it belongs to another time or may really never have existed at all outside of a mutual fantasy. In these early scenes, Ling is entirely dressed in a bright white, as she is in the hotel room, while as a tragic nightclub singer later she wears black like the ironically named Blanche. Their outfits often complement each other in a mix of black and white symbolising both the genuineness of their connection and the corruption stemming from Blanche’s line of work. In the end it maybe Blanche who is trapped within an impossible dream of romance, caught by the futility of her desire, while in a way freeing Ling from the torment of the shadow of an illusionary lover.

We’re Both Grooms (僕もアイツも新郎です。Koji Tanaka, 2022)

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Ryosuke (Shono Hayama) is about to marry the love of his life, Mizuki (Hiroki Iijima), but there’s just one snag. He’s never got round to telling his family or any of his friends that he’s gay, and a sizeable contingent of the wedding party are under the assumption that he’s going to be marrying a woman. A recent addition to the wedding farce genre, Koji Tanaka’s We’re Both Grooms (僕もアイツも新郎です。, Boku mo Aitsu no Shinro desu.) explores both the lingering homophobia in the contemporary society and the internalised shame and fear that prevents people from fully committing to what it is they really want out of life.

It is after all perhaps a little bit strange to meet your child’s intended for the first time at the wedding, but no one really seems to remark on the fact that they have no idea who the groom is supposed to be marrying. But then again, it seems Ryosuke didn’t invite half of these people, they were reeled in by his overzealous mother who, like everyone else, has made a massive assumption. That in itself may imply that Ryosuke doesn’t have many friends. He doesn’t seem to have invited anyone to the wedding aside from his boss, the headmaster of the school where he works, whom he also hasn’t told he’s gay leading to some last minute wedding speech panic. Though his boss is keen to assure him he’s fine with that sort of thing, it’s clear his original speech was full of misogynistic jokes and male banter, while his attempts to correct himself reveal a latent homophobia.

Meanwhile, a childhood friend, again invited by Ryosuke’s mother, is on the one hand hurt he never shared this part of his life with her, and resentful as it seems she had romantic designs on him that prevented her from pursuing other relationships. Mizuki has also invited an ex to the wedding who takes Ryosuke to task for treating Mizuki like a dirty secret, asking how they can live a happy life together if Ryosuke can’t even acknowledge their relationship in public let alone tell the world of his love for Mizuki. Mizuki is also starting to feel guilty and conflicted, realising that he’s insensitively forced Ryosuke into coming out because of his desire to paper over his own anxiety about their relationship through a public commitment ceremony. Japan does not currently legally recognise same-sex marriages, but Mizuki is hoping that the wedding will clarify their relationship status and what they mean to each other, only it seems to have backfired. 

The main obstacle is Ryosuke’s traditionalist, civil servant father (Mantaro Koichi) who outright tries to stop the wedding claiming that his son is just “easily led” and must have been led astray by Mizuki. While all of Mizuki’s family know and accept that he is gay and have also warmed to Ryosuke, Ryosuke’s family do not seem to understand and cannot get their heads around the idea of two men being in a committed relationship despite the grandmother’s public telling off of her son and unexpected announcement that she too is bisexual and that her first love was another woman. Surprisingly, Ryosuke’s father explains that he used to be a delinquent so he faced familial disapproval when he married too but was warmly supported by his wife. Though he confesses that he really just wanted to see Ryosuke marry someone who would make him happy, it takes him quite a bit longer to figure out that he’s trying to do just that. 

The biggest problem remains, however, Ryosuke himself who has evidently not reached the level of self-acceptance that would allow him to fully commit to a romantic relationship, as he’s advised by the ever-helpful wedding planner trying to keep the event on track. Only once he becomes more sure of himself, can tell people proudly that he is gay and that Mizuki is the love of his life, do those around begin to see the authenticity of their relationship and accept it as they would any other. Even Mizuki’s incredibly stiff father eventually comes around with a speech to the effect that the true beauty of life lies in diversity. Despite the farcical comedy at its centre, the film ends on a surprisingly touching note as the couple reaffirm their love for each other and also see it embraced by those around them.

Trailer (English subtitles)

The Mutation (사랑의 탄생, Shin Su-won, 2025) [Fantasia 2026)

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Two people largely excluded from mainstream society bond over a shared sense of loss and loneliness in Shin Su-won’s lighthearted road trip movie, The Mutation (사랑의 탄생). Though the English-language title may sound a little harsh, hinting at some kind of science fiction dystopia, the film is in other ways as the Korean title “The Birth of Love,” implies about self-acceptance and mutual solidarity among those that society has continues to other and reject.

The Korean title is quoted in each of the lives of the protagonists, Se-oh (Han Hyun-min), a man with dark skin who was born to two Korean parents, and Sora (Lee Zoo-young), a gay woman whose former partner took her own life after being pressured into a heteronormative marriage by her conservative mother. Se-oh has been rejected by his family as his father refuses to accept him as his son despite his mother’s assurance that she has remained faithful him. He tries asking an old friend of his mother’s for answers, but she tells him that what matters is only that he was born from love. Sora, meanwhile, discovers a letter written by her late partner Min-ji as a omechild that she titled “the birth of love” and recorded her growing feelings for a female classmate along with the fear that her parents would find out.

Sora’s difference is not visibly obvious in the way that Se-oh’s is, but she still finds that she is excluded from mainstream society. She says that she makes tables because they’re something to be shared rather than used selfishly, but it seems that few people are willing to come to hers despite her instructions to Se-oh that if he got a bigger table for his apartment people would soon come to sit around it. It does however signal her own openness and desire for connection, even if that desire is often rejected or goes unmet. After agreeing to accompany Se-oh on his trip, she too has somewhere she does not have the courage to go alone. On returning to the town where Min-ji lived, she discovers her mother being hassled in the market by a group of religious people who appear to be aware of exactly how her daughter died and why but berate her for not raising her “better”. Min-ji’s mother had thought that if she married, Min-ji would settle down and live a “normal” life, but in the end Min-ji could not live that way. Her mother is now filled with regrets wishing she had accepted her daughter for who she was despite what others may have said in their small and conservative town where the local pastor holds sway.

Min-ji’s mother did not tell Sora of her death for some time nor did she invite her to the funeral, hoping that no one would find out. Se-oh wasn’t invited to his mother’s funeral either and his name is conspicuously absent from the list of official mourners at the funeral hall. He is continually treated as an outsider as strangers automatically address him in English. It never occurs to them to someone who looks like him may have been born and raised in Korea and know no other language, and as such they reject his Koreanness. This has also meant that he has struggled to find employment and has been restricted to doing a series of precarious casual labour jobs, the latest of which is ironically playing the white tiger at a local amusement park. People like me better when I wear a mask, he says, which perhaps something Sora can also understand.

But she also says that Min-ji was the only person she ever knew who didn’t wear one, implying that it may not be possible to survive in this society as an authentic person without some kind of boundary between oneself and others. Nevertheless, through their gentle road trip, the pair begin to come to terms with the past and also with themselves in gaining a level of self-acceptance that allows them to move forward, together or apart. Warm and gentle in spirit, the film makes the most of its idyllic country settings while focusing on the simple power of human connection in the face of a world that can often be harsh and unforgiving of those it perceives to be somehow other.

The Mutation screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Tiger (Anshul Chauhan, 2025)

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At 35 years old, Taiga (Takashi Kawaguchi) is beginning to tire of city life and thinking of settling down, but as a gay man in contemporary Japan, there are limits to how much that is possible for him. Inspired by real life stories from the LGBTQ+ community, Anshul Chauhan’s Tiger is more character study than issue drama, but explores the ways in which Taiga’s horizons are constrained by the way society receives his sexuality to the point that he finds himself considering entering a platonic marriage as the only real way to ensure a full domestic life with the possibility of raising children.

As someone from the “Friendship Marriage” organisation points out, even the recently introduced partnership system available in some areas of Japan is a long way from a legal marriage and is geared more towards housing provision and hospital visits. It doesn’t confer inheritance rights for those who own property, or even the right to attend a funeral if the other relatives object. Child adoption is relatively rare in Japan in any case and not generally available to same sex couples while even costly options such as IVF and surrogacy could be bureaucratically difficult given the way the family register system works. 

Though the woman giving the presentation seems incredibly angry about the weakness of the partnership system legislation, labelling it “a disgrace”, it can’t be denied that Friendship Marriage is essentially complicit with the heteronormative views of mainstream society in which it is still socially and in some cases practically difficult not to be married. After signing up for the service, Taiga meets a woman who is half-Iranian and grew up in Tehran. It doesn’t occur to him that her decision to come to Japan was not made entirely freely and that she cannot safely return there without the threat of violence. Taiga may feel himself constrained, but he won’t be arrested or tortured solely for existing as a gay man. Nevertheless, he faces reduced options when it comes to employment and has never revealed his sexuality to his father fearing that he will reject or disown him.

Tensions come to a head, as they so often do, when the matter of inheritance is raised. Taiga’s sister Minami (Maho Nonami) is aware of his sexuality though does not seem altogether accepting and is resentful of his life in Tokyo which she assumes to be aimless and free of responsibility while she has had to shoulder the burden of caring for their ageing father alone. It’s obvious that she has been banking on inheriting the family home and is resentful on hearing their father has suggested leaving it to Taiga on the condition that he marries and has children, knowing that this is something that is not possible in contemporary Japan. The implication is that Taiga had no choice but to leave his home town in order to lead a more authentic life and essentially develops two opposing personas, that of “Tiger” the aspiring porn star and “Taiga” the would-be-family man. 

Minami later wields this duality against him, asking him to baby-sit her daughter Kaede to whom he is especially close, while threatening to out him to their father if he doesn’t agree to give up his right to the domestic space represented by their family home. His former lover, Koji (Yuya Endo), has entered a conventional heterosexual marriage without disclosing his sexuality to his wife and is riddled with regrets over not leaving with Taiga and trying to start a domestic life in the city as a gay couple. The Friendship Marriage system removes the element of betrayal, but also elides authenticity in providing a mechanism for each partner to fulfil social and parental expectation while avoiding disclosing their sexuality, and equally prevents them from enjoying a full and loving domestic relationship with a same-sex partner.

The film never particularly suggests that there is anything wrong with the way Taiga is living in Tokyo nor with his desire to get into gay porn, but merely highlights the sense of emptiness he feels as someone denied the possibility a full domestic life. There is after all a kind of age cap involved in his life as a sex worker working at a men-only massage parlour which he may fast be approaching even aside from the clients who like to exorcise their own sense of powerless by paying money to abuse and humiliate him. In the end, all he’s left with is an uncertain liminal space living as a literal stand-in marooned on the sidelines with no place to call his own.

Tiger screens as part of this year’s Nippon Connection.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Images: © Tiger Production Partners

We’re Nothing at All (我們不是什麼, Herman Yau, 2026)

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When a bus explodes in the middle of the city on Valentine’s Day, it opens a series of old wounds in Herman Yau’s self-financed state of the nation genre picture, We’re Nothing At All (我們不是什麼). The vision the paints of contemporary Hong Kong is indeed bleak. Radio and television reports talk only of economic downturn with businesses going bust while traditional spaces like wet markets are dying in the ever-changing city. Engaging with the idea of “lam chau” or mutually assured destruction, this is a Hong Kong on the brink of explosion.

Indeed, the bombers justify themselves that there are no innocent snowflakes in an avalanche and that, therefore, everyone else on the bus has contributed to the circumstances that have made their impossible. The largest of these is entrenched homophobia that has seen the two men exiled from mainstream society. Shy sketch artist Ike inadvertently hints at his sexuality in deflecting his parents’ marriage talk by snapping back that he cannot get married in Hong Kong which is another basic right he has been denied. He can only tell his family about his sexuality by writing a note and passing it through the letterbox. When his father reads it, he beats him and calls him a freak, telling him never to come home again. His family do not report him missing, and it seems it doesn’t occur to them that he might have been on the bus. 

Yau uses homosexuality more as a metaphor for marginalisation rather than a topic for exploration in and of itself. That said, it’s clear that their exclusion from mainstream society as gay men contributes to the poverty that otherwise defines their lives. Fai lives in a subdivided apartment and faces workplace exploitation when the construction site he was working at abruptly stops paying its labourers and his attempts to strike prove ineffective. He fares little better after getting a job at a restaurant with a similarly exploitative boss. Ike, meanwhile, is hassled by police while selling sketches with the implication being that law enforcement would rather go after ordinary people for small infractions while protecting the interests of large corporations. 

Ike at one point attempts to take his own life by jumping from a window in Fai’s subdivided flat, but is distracted by someone else jumping from a higher a floor. It’s at this point that Fai turns his anger back on society, asking him what the point of dying alone is and telling him that if they’re going to go, they should drag a few others along with them. Unable to see a way of transcending their circumstances, the two men can only envision freedom in death and stage a rebellion against the society they feel has rejected them.

The film obviously does not condone their actions, it also places the blame on societal and indifference particularly in the ways in which a wealthier middle-class world unsees men like Fai and Ike and prefers to move anything it finds unpleasant out of its line of sight. In the course of the investigation, the police move through an underground world of backstreet clubs where middle-aged women go to blow off steam and ageing sex worker Andrew desperately tries to stay afloat. Even veteran policeman Leung has his frustrations, admitting that he too came close to blowing the world to hell after he was forced out of the police force due to what he sees as an unfair double standard. 

Even so, his claim that he was saved by the love of a good woman reinforces a societal bias and suggests that the only path to success lies in self-repression. Despite his skills, Leung is depicted as something of a dinosaur with his desire to return to a world where smoking at the office was not only fine but encouraged. Aside from one young man, the other assistants mostly ignore him while he clashes with his more conventional colleagues, but in exploring the circumstances that led to the bus bombing, Leung begins to dig into a pressure cooker society and comes to the conclusion there were many such people like Fai and Ike or even himself who find themselves on the brink of explosion.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Open Endings (Nigel Santos, 2025)

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Is it acceptable to be friends with your exes? Charlie’s (Janella Salvador) bond with her friendship group made up of women who’ve all been romantically entangled at one point or another becomes a problem for her new relationship. Rafa (Rachel Coates) finds the situation altogether too weird, and even goes so far as to ask Charlie to cut her friends off. It might not be a good idea to date someone who tries to isolate you from friends and family, but Rafa claims these are just her boundaries and she can’t help feeling uneasy with Charlie spending so much time with women she’s previously slept with.

Then again, it’s not easy to be gay in the Philippines and this community is quite small. Can you really afford to cut people off just because of potential awkwardness? Each of the women is struggling in their own way, but tries to support her friends and is supported in return. The group only really formed as the exes banded together to look after Hannah when her partner passed away. Sundays have now become sacred to them as a time they can all come together and share their fears and worries no matter the various unresolved feelings that exist between them.

These relationships are often messy and ill-defined, but genuine and heartfelt. For Kit (Klea Pineda), friendship is most the beautiful of gifts and she fears acting on her feelings for Charlie because she doesn’t want to ruin what they have. Still closeted not wanting to upset her parents are religious and conservative, Kit is in an awkward non-relationship with a married woman who is also the mother of one of her pupils at the school where she teaches. Alexa (Yesh Anne Burce) is trapped with a heteronormative relationship she cannot escape because divorce is still not legal in the Philippines. Constrained by her own circumstances, she becomes possessive of Kit who is the only path back to her authentic self and the only person with whom she can be free. In other ways, however, perhaps the impossibility relationship suits Kit because she cannot be her authentic self either while unable to reveal her sexuality to her parents. 

The impossibility of divorce is also a factor when Hannah (Jasmine Curtis-Smith) suddenly drops the bombshell that she’s become engaged to a man. The group’s only bisexual, Hannah faces prejudice from her family who express relief that she’s finally got over her lesbian phase and rediscovered the right path, while the friends also see it as a kind of betrayal though perhaps only because she kept her new relationship secret from them for several months. Charlie is also subjected to homophobic violence when a man barges into the gay bar where she’s drinking and propositions her, insisting that she is “alone” because he’s only seen her with another woman. When he finally figures it out, he sees it as a challenge and quickly becomes violent. 

These kinds of petty aggressions remind the women of their precarious position within a hostile society that enforcers heteronormativity and traditional gender roles. Their friendship is a small bubble of resistance that gives each of the women additional confidence to continue being who they are. This atmosphere of hostility plays into Mihan’s insecurities, her far of commitment and inability to clearly declare her feelings. She resents Hannah for choosing to marry a man as if she were doing it because of social expectation rather than personal desire, while also forced to accept that this is all her fault. She had plenty of time to try and patch things up with Hannah, but never did. 

The open-ended nature of these relationships leaves Mihan with anxiety, but it also allows these women to continue being friends and supporting each other. The friendship doesn’t have to end just because the romance did. But at the same time, she has to accept that the risk of heartbreak is something that has to be actively embraced and her tendency to skip out on relationships the moment they become serious leaves her only with a lack of resolution. Painting a warm and funny portrait of contemporary queer life in the Philippines which nevertheless does not shy away from its difficulties, Open Endings celebrates most of all the joyousness and power of female friendship in the face of social hostility.

Open Endings screened as part of this year’s Queer East.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Girlfriends (女孩不平凡, Tracy Choi Ian-Sin, 2025)

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Now in her mid-30s, Lok (Fish Liew) feels as if she were perpetually standing at a crossing waiting for the light to turn green. She made her first film five years ago, but hasn’t been able to make another one since. A producer likes her script, but tells her that with this kind of content they won’t be able to release it in Mainland China or Malaysia, so they won’t be able to recoup their investment. As he says though, the script can always be tweaked and if she rewrote it including a role for an actress looking for a comeback they might be in business.

But Lok doesn’t really want to compromise. Tracy Choi Ian-Sin’s semi-autobiographical Girlfriends (女孩不平凡) is in many ways about the of fear of being railroaded into something that’s not what you really want. After an argument with her girlfriend Bei (Jennifer Yu), Lok begins to look back on her life in reverse chronological order inching towards the source of her insecurity in her Macao childhood. At 17, she faced intense pressure to conform. As a member of the debate team, she’s tasked with making an argument for something she doesn’t believe in and resents being forced to say what’s expected of her rather than how she really feels. Her parents expect her to go a local university and become a civil servant without really giving her much choice in the matter. The older sister of a classmate, Faye (Eliz Lum) is the first person who asks her what it is she really wants. 

Lok finds herself watching 2004 Hong Kong drama Butterfly and trying to sort out her confusing feelings for Faye while secretly taking the exam to study at a university in Taiwan in the hope of living a freer life, if only for four years. There seems to be a part of present-day Lok that still thinks she’s on an extended holiday and will one day have to return to Macao and become a civil servant after all. She’s incapable of thinking of the future and seems to be mothered, to a certain extent, in all her relationships as her respective partners take on the burden of practical considerations like financial planning. Each time things start to get serious, she begins to back away, even ghosting her Taiwan girlfriend to return to Macao alone without saying goodbye.

Both the Taiwan girlfriend and Bei seem to want move back to Macao with Lok without even really considering if she actually wants to go. This assumption seems to further fuel her desperation and send her looking for an escape route. Returning to Macao with a girlfriend does not seem to be an option for her because Macao represents conventionality and the life she doesn’t really want but still deep down thinks she is unable to escape. Never having fully addressed her lost love for Faye, she lacks the courage to commit or to believe in a long-term future. Her apartment seems to be full of reminders of old lovers, while she remains uncommunicative and insecure. Using sex as a means of avoiding confrontation, she has a tendency to storm out rather than have a conversation and has never fully accepted herself. When her long-term girlfriend Bei starts talking about serious things like marriage and children, she tells her that she wants her to have a “normal” life, as if she were preventing Bei from having one.

Bei is indeed under the pressure of conventionality, nagged by parents who still haven’t accepted her relationship with Lok to settle down and marry a man. Lok’s family in Macao seem to have already accepted Bei as her wife, but still Lok can’t get over the mental hurdle of believing that she has a right to a future of her own choosing. After her script is turned down, she goes to the cinema to see The Lyricist Wannabe and over identifies with a line in which the heroine is bluntly told that if she’s spent all this time waiting and still not got anywhere, perhaps it’s time to consider another career. Her lack of success further deepens her insecurity as Bei practically points out that they do actually need some money coming in, and perhaps they might have to compromise their artistic dreams as an actress and a director under the pressure of living in difficult economic circumstances while planning for their long-term financial future. It doesn’t sound very romantic, but in a way it is. It’s only by looking back over her life and failed relationships and returning to Macao to put her past to rest, that Lok is finally able to stop chasing the ghost of Faye and gains the courage to seize the future that she really wants.

Girlfriends screened as part of this year’s Queer East.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

The Outsiders (孽子, Yu Kan-Ping, 1986)

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Released at the tail end of martial law, Yu Kan-Ping’s adaptation of Pai Hsien-Yung’s seminal novel Crystal Boys seems to anticipate a coming liberation, but also perhaps that even then not all will be free. The film’s Chinese title, Unfilial Sons (孽子, nièzǐ), hints at the way it, in a certain sense, circles back to a kind of conservatism in which the hero must reconcile with his abusive father for cultural rather than personal or psychological reasons. But at the same time, perhaps this reconciliation will be necessary at the time the present regime falls and speaks more of a need for peace as the authoritarian father must learn to accept that he has a gay son and will end his life alone if hex chooses not to do so.

Li Qing’s (Shao Hsin) father is, in many ways, a symbol of the authoritarian regime in that he is a former KMT soldier who came to Taiwan with Chang Kai-Shek after the Chinese civil war. Filled with notions of toxic masculinity, he kicks Qing out when he is expelled from high school after being caught having sex with a male lab assistant. Screaming at him in the street, he calls him a “degenerate” and tells him never to come home. Yet it seems obvious that Qing’s father has no real power and all his abuses stem from just this fact. His son’s homosexuality calls his own manhood into question, while his violence towards his wife also stems from his insecurity that she will leave him for a better man. She eventually does leave him for a trumpet player, abandoning her two sons the youngest of which dies as a direct result of his father’s neglect. 

Though Qing was a wounded, lonely little boy who felt himself rejected by both parents due to his mother’s obvious preference for his brother, he adopts a maternal position that comparable to that shown to him by “Mama Yang” who takes in “homeless birds” or young gay men who’ve been rejected by their birth families and have nowhere else to go. Qing was kicked out not only of his home but the school too, leaving him educationally disadvantaged. He can only earning a living as a sex worker in the Peace Memorial Park which has become a cruising spot for gay men. Pushed out of the mainstream society and left with nowhere to go, they have repurposed this public space as their own but are not safe even in here given the frequency of police raids. Auntie Mann, the former actress who lives with Yang, asks him where these young men are supposed to go if they can no longer go to the park with the consequence that they decide to formalise their situation by selling Yang’s photo studio and the building Mann owns to open a gay nightclub called The Blue Angel.

The club speaks of a need to carve out one’s own space in a hostile society, but also the commodification of gay life that accompanies greater acceptance. The park was free and money could also be earned there, but here the guests will need to pay because this is, after all, a business in addition to being a community hub. It also seems that for whatever reason, policemen are also drinking here, so it is not completely liberated and its existence depends on not offending the authorities. Nevertheless, it otherwise extends the family forged by Yang and Mann to a wider community of queer people by offering them a safer space in which they can be their authentic selves if only for a short time.

This seems to be true for Mann’s former director who seems to make a point of going everywhere with two very young and attractive women hanging on his arms, but abandons them to flirt with men at the club. Closted movie Hua Kuo-Pao similarly seems to have taken a liking to Qing, but must presumably keep his sexuality secret in order to go on working. Dangers are spoken of regarding the potential violence of obsessive love in a repressed community as Yang cautions Qing about entering an affair with Dragon, a man he meets in the park, who killed his lover Phoenix in a crime of passion and has been a wandering soul ever since having convinced himself never to love again because it would only end in death.

Yu frames murder as a moment of gothic madness as fog rises behind the bridge in the park, which was already a space of darkness and depression symbolising the degree to which these men are already isolated within their society. Another of the young men Yang takes in ties to take his own life after his lover kicks him out. Though the others tell him his boyfriend was not worth dying for, the problem seems to be more that being thrown out again convinced him he had nowhere else to go. If it were not for Yang and Auntie Mann, he would be totally alone. There does seem to be, however, a degree of tension in the relationship between Yang and Auntie Mann in which there exists a deep platonic love that cannot be resolved sexually. Just as he saves the boys, Yang also once saved Mann from an addiction to drugs, though he could not save her film career or hope for feminine fulfilment through marriage. The Blue Angel club finally only possible because of Mann’s acceptance that she will never be an actress again nor marry for love. Yang has been a kind of beard for her, helping her save face and avoid the stigma of being an unattached woman by making it look like there was a man in her life, just as she perhaps provided security for him in ways other than allowing him to rent his shop from her cheaply and have a place to live.

So tying into the film’s title, these new support networks play into a heteronormative vision of the family in which Yang becomes a father figure to Qing and teaches him how to live a more fulfilling, safer life as a gay man in contrast to his birth father’s authoritarian attempts at dominance. Another of the boys eventually leaves with a lover to look for their father in Japan, but seemingly struggles to find him reflecting the way in which each of them search for a more positive parental input having been failed or abandoned by their birth families. What they discover is a sense of brotherhood and solidarity that gives them a place to call home within the community. Nevertheless, the film ends with the symbolic gesture of Qing following Yang’s advice and attempting to reconcile with his father though an “unfilial son”, while his father too seems to have pulled himself together and is readier to accept Qing for who he is. This sense of homecoming for the homeless bird may then play into a code of familial obligation which could itself by oppressive, but also signals a new beginning and the opening up of a more liberated era.

The Outsiders screened as part of this year’s Queer East.