Queer East Festival takes in Brighton as part of rapid expansion

Queer East director Yi Wang is delighted with the way the festival has established itself particularly after the misfortune of making its debut during the pandemic year.

“I am the founder and we didn't plan to start it during a pandemic! The festival was planned for April 2020 but then because of the pandemic we had to put some things online and postpone many other things. We're now not afraid of anything! But in a way I was prepared. I was in Taiwan back in the January of the pandemic year where it was already starting so I was able to prepare myself.

“But we did manage to do everything that we had planned to do in our first year. It just took an extremely long time. It took ten months to screen all the films and then in the second year in 2021 we got pretty much back to normal and since then we have been getting bigger every year.”

This year the festival is promising a “remarkable” line-up of contemporary feature films, documentaries and shorts as well as special events that highlight a wide range of

LGBTQ+ stories from East Asia, Southeast Asia and their diaspora communities.

As Yi says, it was founded in response to the systemic lack of East and Southeast Asian representation on stage, screen and behind the scenes. The festival is now celebrating its fifth anniversary this year. Its Brighton venue will be Duke's at Komedia.

“I started it from the very simple realisation from my personal experience living in this country that I didn't get a lot of East Asia and Southeast Asia films relating to my heritage and to my personal stories about queerness. Naive as I may have been I thought nobody would do anything about it unless I did. There are a lot of East Asia and Southeast Asia queer films being made and there is a long history of queer film-making but it just seemed that we didn't really talk about them in this country, and especially Southeast Asia seemed to be extremely underrepresented. That's why I decided to do this festival and bring films to the people that would not have the chance to see them before.

“And we can definitely say that the festival is growing every year. We've had a chance to work with the country's leading venues including BFI South Bank and the Barbican Centre in London and we've worked with a lot of very high-profile prominent venues. In London we do two weeks and now we are touring for two or three months.

“I think it really shows that people have just never had the chance to see these films before and the great thing is that we seem to attract some really young people to the cinema because of the content which just isn't available Netflix. The only way you can come and see it is in the cinema with us, and that feels very special.”

Films this year include:

A Song Sung Blue (China, 2023). Nominated for the Queer Palm and Golden Camera at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, A Song Sung Blue follows lonely, 15-year-old Xian as she experiences a summer she will never forget. When her mother moves away for work, Xian moves in with her free spirited photographer father and a restless summer ensues when she becomes infatuated with his assistant's daughter, the extroverted Mingmei. A Song Sung Blue is the feature debut from acclaimed short film director Geng Zihan (A Ray of Sunshine, 2019; Green Screen, 2021), and features vivid cinematography, exceptional performances from Kay Huang and Jing Liang, and is a testament to the innocence and impulses of youth, which signals the arrival of a powerful new voice in queer cinema.

Bye Bye Love - 50th anniversary screening (Japan, 1974). 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 Last Year of Darkness - (China, USA, 2023). Ben Mullinkosson’s (Don’t Be a Dick About It) coming-of-age documentary is a love letter to the Chengdu underground scene. With construction cranes looming, the future of queer-friendly techno club Funky Town is unclear, leaving party goers forced to make the most of their remaining time there.

Shorts programmes Shades of Faith + Q&A and Let the Waves Carry You will also both be playing.