Porous Encounters: A Queer East Correspondence

This is the first of three pieces published in collaboration with Queer East Film Festival, whose Emerging Critics project brought together six writers for a programme of mentorship throughout the festival.

Rebecca Liu

Recently, the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre published a study that found the racial demographic with the lowest participation in cultural life in the UK is Asians. Perhaps this could be attributed to the UK​’s immigration policies, which working professionals are granted entry into the country, and what their attitudes towards the arts are; perhaps this could be attributed to a worldwide recession that has exerted pressure on where people choose to spend money, on top of a domestic financial structure that has diverted government funding from the arts to STEM. Perhaps it could be any number of things outside the scope of this dispatch.

Whatever the reason may be, Asians‘ low rates of participation factor into the British Film Institute​’s process of deciding where to distribute funding, with Queer East being one of the recipients. If nothing else, no one can accuse the UK government of not trying, at least, to maintain the appearance of supporting a diverse arts scene. But what does such pluralism mean in a cultural landscape where the relations of production are increasingly determined by one​’s proximity to capital? Lowkenuinely, in the parlance of terminally-online Gen‑Z, it​’s a bad time to be young, a person of color, and queer/​trans, and God forbid… a mix of all three. 

I say this not to be a doomer, but because of the current cultural climate. It​’s been notoriously difficult to get a job, racism is on the rise, and the homies still cannot get state-funded t‑dicks! These material conditions have not changed, no matter how many Asians we have seen on the screen this past year. Not that Asians on screen have fared any better in these circumstances. For creatives too, the past few years have made it hard to scrape together external funding for left-field projects that don​’t slot neatly into the bottom-line of production budgets funded by the likes of Netflix or other privately-owned companies, with governments offering little support. Downstream of this, the media that comes out of this financial structure reflects this narrowing of financial honeypots – not much diversity, lots of iterative slop. 

The curation of films at this year​’s Queer East Film Festival responds well to this financial and cultural conservatism with a heaping serving of faggotry and other perverse pleasures. Arguably, part of the scope of queer art is to de-aestheticise and question heteronormative relations that produce capital accumulation. DIY filmmaking functions as one such method of destabilisation in Tender Guerrillas: Self-Filming and Queer Becomings, curated by Najrin Islam. Through their improvisational camera work, the films present an array of idiosyncratic visual languages that affirm the multiplicity of what queerness, what South Asian-ness can look like. Without flattening such subjectivities into an essentialist identity, we see the plurality of what family can be, what productivity can be, what a good life can be. In particular, Riyad Vinci Wadia​’s insistence on transgressing social codes in BOMgAY culminates in a memorable library hook-up scene, in which gleaming sculpted men fuck and get fucked among the stacks of books. The DIY animation of Tejal Shah​’s There​’s a Spider Living Between Us renders illicit desire legible, animating through paper cutouts what otherwise is difficult to vocalise out loud: thoughts about sex, thoughts about our parents having sex, what female desire looks like for us versus our mothers. In Summer in My Veins, Nishit Saran goes back and forth between telling his mother that he is gay and keeping it an undisclosed secret. His self-reflexive camera oscillates between himself and his mother, dissolving the boundaries of subject and object, director and directed. One is not simply queer or South Asian, but becomes queer and South Asian.

Further hedging against a conception of queerness or Asian-ness as a singular narrative, Emily Jisoo Bowles​’s programming of 💦💦💦💦💦 played with queerness as il/​legible. The title of 💦💦💦💦💦 itself is enigmatic suggesting that the edges of queerness, like water, are difficult to contract within a single container. Many of the shorts in this programme are oneiric in quality, like Ngọc Duy Lê’s Before the Sea Forgets and director duo Đoàn Thanh Toàn and Nguyễn Lê Hoàng Phúc​’s Buoyant. What is real and what is imagined is difficult to parse through as scenes move from post-war remembering and skate park hangs in Before the Sea Forgets, and a camp‑y dance scene featuring a mermaid in Buoyant. Strung together, these narratives seem to ask: is there even a point in distinguishing between reality and imagination? A fin-de-siecle piece from Whammy Alcazaren​’s Water Sports takes the fictive to the extreme, imagining an apocalyptic world not too different from the contemporary moment, in which the people of the Philippines are so starved for water that teenagers Jelson and Ipe are forced to drink each others‘ piss in order to survive drought.

In the parlance of an even older, terminally-online generation, these films are not gay as in happy but queer as in fuck you. Every naming is a political choice, and the East in Queer East lives up to this too. The coherence of such a large range of ethnic identities into one directional descriptor can perhaps be read as a refusal to articulate a geopolitical border. Even as tariff wars and neo-nationalist tides have raised populist support for draconian border regimes, issues like genocide or famine are not isolated to one locality, but affect all of us. What then is the role of the arts in such a cultural landscape, when much of popular media concedes to a status quo dictated by corporate interests? This is where film festivals such as Queer East fulfill a doubly crucial niche. In addition to providing support to a marginalised racial demographic, Queer East also supports a marginalised demographic within the cinematic landscape – independent filmmakers, experimental filmmakers, and artists whose works move beyond the frame of the celluloid screen.

Nam Huh 

I arrive in London from Sheffield with a head full of unfinished reading and the slightly irrational feeling that I might be walking into a space that already knows how it wants to be read. Queer East has that reputation from the outside. One of the largest Asian-focused queer film festivals in the UK, but also something more fragile than scale can describe. A gathering that feels at once institutional and improvised, as if it is still being assembled in real time through screenings, conversations, and the small logistics of people moving between venues.

What strikes me first is the atmosphere enveloping the programme. Audiences drifting between cinemas, lingering longer than necessary in foyers, conversations stretching into stairwells and late-night streets. People seem to recognise each other across screenings, even if they cannot quite place the face. The repetition of faces begins to structure the festival as much as the films do. Coming from outside London, I am aware of how socially and geographically concentrated this space feels. Queer East becomes a temporary convergence of Asian and queer cultural life in the UK, held together by cinema but also by exhaustion, curiosity, and proximity. The category of ​“Asian” here is less a stable identity than a practical roof – a way of sheltering otherwise dispersed histories, languages, and social worlds in the same room.

Across the programme, a pattern emerges that feels more significant than any single film. Queerness manifests as a quiet current transmitted unevenly between generations, rather than as a loud declaration. It moves through performance, coded behaviour, care, and forms of social navigation that slip right through the fingers of contemporary identity language. In Park Joonho​’s 3670, which follows a closeted North Korean defector trying to navigate the complex social codes of Seoul​’s underground gay subculture, queer life is organised through a distinct geography of timing. The film​’s very title is a ​“pager code” for an evening meetup. Within this world, Jongno 3-ga Station Exit 6 at 7 pm becomes far more than a spot on a map; it is a password. It is a way of moving through the city that relies on shared, insular knowledge rather than overt public visibility. The architecture of the subway exit, the specific hour, and the subtle shifts in posture replace the need for flags. Watching the film in London, I am reminded how much queer survival still depends on this kind of unofficial scaffolding – knowing exactly where to stand, how to read proximity, and knowing when ambiguity serves as protection rather than an absence. The festival follows a similar rhythm. Audiences learn their own subtle choreography – where to sit, when to linger after a credit roll, how to approach a Q&A, and how to recognise others who are temporarily caught in the same circuit.

If 3670 captures the contemporary grammar of coded queer navigation, The Girl Princes pulls into a different register of time. The film follows elderly performers from the Female Gukgeuk tradition, a Korean all-female theatre form where women played male roles, spending their lives mastering the weight and posture of masculinity. The work stubbornly refuses to be contained by today​’s vocabulary. Younger viewers exposed to modern queer discourse might look at these women and search for clear, hyper-visible labels, wanting to claim them retroactively as transmasculine or non-binary pioneers. But the performers don​’t speak that language. They don​’t view their lives through the lens of modern gender politics; rather, their queerness is a lived, vocational reality, sustained through decades of gesture, voice, and posture. For them, masculinity is not a political banner to wave, but a craft inherited and lived. Watching them, I find myself thinking about how different generations inherit queerness unevenly. At times this generational dissonance becomes visible in the cinema. Younger viewers often search for clear political statements in post-screening discussions, for ways of naming what they have just seen. Older attendees sometimes respond with a quieter nod, as if recognition does not require explanation. The films sit somewhere between these modes of understanding, neither fully legible nor completely opaque.

A sharp domestic counterpoint to these urban movements appears in Ong Kuo Sin​’s A Good Child. The film follows Jia Hao, a sassy Singaporean drag queen who, after years of estrangement, reluctantly goes home to care for his mother following her dementia diagnosis. Here, the lens shifts away from public space or stylised performance to focus on the messier but quieter details of dependency, asking what it means to stay present for someone who is changing, forgetting, or slipping into a different version of themselves. Placed alongside 3670 and The Girl Princes, the film shifts the festival​’s generational plane. If 3670 maps queer survival in contemporary urban space, and The Girl Princes holds onto historical theatre performances where gender is lived on stage, A Good Child introduces the slower, private infrastructures of care that keeps both afloat. It shows how queer lives are looked after in the quiet, not just expressed in the light.

Across these films, Queer East avoids showcasing a unified narrative of queer Asian experience. What it stages instead is something more honest as it is unresolved: a set of overlapping stories that rarely align cleanly. Modern survival codes sit beside older stage traditions, which sit beside the slow, heavy time of memory and care. None of these fully translates into the next. This is where the festival becomes most interesting as a curatorial space. Rather than offering representation as a fixed picture, it allows these different registers of queer life to sit side-by-side without forcing them to agree. The result is adjacency over coherence unfolding as a series of partially shared vocabularies, never a single story.

What lingers after leaving the cinema is a sense of having moved through different ways of inhabiting queer time. Walking out into London at night, past groups of people still talking outside venues, I am aware of how temporary this arrangement is. How quickly it will disperse again. Before this happens though, the festival serves as a brief anchor, holding these fragments together just long enough to see how they look next to one another.