Queer East Film Festival arrives in London

See some rare queer cinema from Asia screened across London (17-28 April)!

For its fifth round, the Queer East Film Festival London has blessed us with a serious program of features and shorts from ten different countries to be screened at venues including The Barbican, Genesis, and BFI.

Films include: Bye Bye Love by Isao Fujisawa marking its 50th anniversary, A Song Sung Blue making its UK premiere, and a screening of The River by Tsai Ming-Liang. In which, we follow Hsiao-Kang who gets roped into participating in a film shoot, in which he plays a dead body floating in the Tamsui River in Taipei. However, the polluted, dirty water results in provoking a health crisis. This slow minimalist cinema style creates a very, “sly queer critique of the nuclear family.”

Curator and Programmer, Jason Tan Liwag elaborates on the program, “Most of the initial programs were all films that I had fallen in love with previously in the Philippines. But I wasn't sure they'd get a space outside of the country to screen.”

“The rest was based off my own proclivities. HONEY was a film I saw at a Super 8 cinema screening that surprised me with its humour and LISYUN QNG GEOGRAFIA as a short launched Petersen Vargas, one of the main queer film directors in the Philippines, into mainstream attention.”

He adds, “I would suggest you watch any of the Filipino films in the lineup — particularly Carl Papa's animated feature ITI MAPUKPUKAW.”