Queer East Festival
The Queer East Festival 2024 nationwide tour is heading to the Cameo Picturehouse in Edinburgh from 17th - 21st October.
About Queer East Festival
Founded in response to the systemic lack of East and Southeast Asian representation on stage, screen and behind the scenes, Queer East Festival was formed in 2020 and has made its mark across the UK with its bold programmes of LGBTQ+ cinema and visual arts, growing in popularity and size year-on-year, and celebrating its fifth anniversary this year.
Queer East Festival’s ground-breaking film programme challenges conventions and stereotypes giving audiences an opportunity to explore the contemporary queer landscape across East and Southeast Asia. With its fifth anniversary edition, Queer East Festival reaffirms a commitment to diversifying the cultural landscape in the UK, and to serving as a platform that nurtures dialogue on the multifaceted understandings of what it means to be Asian and queer today.
Films screening:
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.
The River (Taiwan, 1997)
Tsai Ming-liang is one of the most celebrated ‘Second New Wave’ film directors of Taiwanese cinema and his shockingly subversive 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.
Love Bound + Q&A (UK, 2024)
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.
Welcome to Neverland (shorts programme)
Blurring boundaries between reality and fantasy, the filmmakers in this programme delve into weird and wonderful experiences that ignite the possibility of change: personal, political, and philosophical. To be queer is, literally, to be strange or odd, which here serves as a means of challenging cultural understandings of gender and sexuality. Through blood, fish scales, and sexy copies of Hegel’s oeuvre, the films in this collection make otherworldliness a point of pride.
Image: Bye Bye Love
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Other Events at Cameo Picturehouse
Queer East: On The Road 2025 in Edinburgh
Queer East: On the Road 2025 takes place in Edinburgh from 19th - 26th November at Cameo Picturehouse. Expect a boundary pushing line-up of features that explore the ever-evolving queer landscape.
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Iron Ladies Film screening + Q&A
IRON LADIS is the inspirational story of the iron-willed, working-class women who, during the 1984–85 Miners’ Strike, found themselves at the forefront of a battle against the British state.
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