Sensory Pleasures and Queer Realities: A Queer East Confessional

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.

Yanni Zhou

I often arrive at the cinema in a rush, entering the darkness while carrying the outside world with me. My body gets there before my mind does; a residue of adrenaline lingers, colliding almost accidentally with the sensory force of the images. In the first half of Queer East, this unfinished state of arrival became the very window to look through. Across the screenings I attended, desire was never forced into frame. It appeared instead through silence, gesture, humour, and the delicate afterlife of rooms once occupied.

I arrived at the ICA for The Erotics of Space: Hiroyuki Oki on a Sunday evening, rushing through St James​’s Park with my ears still full of late-weekend noise. Oki​’s world materialised before I had time to notice. The four works in the programme are silent – alarmingly so – until the absence of sound becomes almost tactile, a midsummer current meeting the pulse of my own heartbeats. Across these archival pieces, Oki blurs diary, documentary, and fiction through the intimate texture of 8mm and 16mm film. Both Color Wind (1991) and Landscape Catching (1992) are shot in the Kochi prefecture, a beloved location for the artist. Rural roads, buildings, signs, boys’ shy smiles and direct gazes return through summer glare and leaking light. These recurring figures are not quite characters, but bodies held in heat, wandering and doing almost nothing, while desire gathers in the stubborn rhythm of looking.

In Color Eyes (1992), a seven-minute silent film shot on 16mm, Oki brings this erotic attention closer to the body and to the textures of gay life in early 1990s Japan. Abound with extreme close-ups of faces, a melting ice cream, two male figures kissing, dancers practising in rooms or on rooftops as the city drifts behind them, the film lets bodies move between private intimacy and public exposure freely and almost desperately, as if warmth itself is looking for air. This direct gaze carries into Melody for Buddy Matsumae (1993), where Matsumae, a boy who also appears in Color Eyes returns as the anchor for a more personal state of love. Written in the fragmentary rhythm of a diary and covering a ten-day seaside stay, the film is split by a departure that transforms domestic intimacy into an archive of presence and absence. Oki documents his real-life lover​’s body with a meticulous, eccentric tenderness: a quiet gaze toward the window in the morning light, a silhouette returning to the room at night, feet glimpsed from beneath a table, or cigarette smoke drifting from the ground up. After the lover​’s departure, in the silence of the empty room, Oki redirects the camera toward himself through a series of self-portrait performances. Shifting in and out of frame, his own body becomes a playful gesture of longing. It is the space left by the lover​’s body that makes the room vibrate.

This vibration hardens into the classical architecture of Masahiro Shinoda​’s With Beauty and Sorrow (1965), screened from a 35mm print shipped from Japan for the occasion. Rarely have I felt a film so intensely composed through wide interior shots. After Oki​’s humid intimacy, Shinoda​’s Kyoto winter feels abruptly enclosed: desire is manifested into compressed spaces, holding the characters at a beautiful yet punishing distance, before erupting through a series of abstract paintings.

Adapted from Yasunari Kawabata​’s novel Beauty and Sadness, the film follows Otoko (Kaoru Yachigusa), a painter whose past is reopened when the older married novelist who once impregnated and abandoned her returns. Around this wound, her young pupil Keiko constructs a plot of revenge against Otoko​’s ex-lover (Sō Yamamura) and his family in the name of love. The film​’s spatial grammar turns desire into something both visible and entrapping. Sliding doors, paper screens, and overlapping frames divide the house into chambers of gaze, while Keiko​’s rage is repeatedly framed as dangerous excess. Even revenge offers no release. By the final scene, her explosive agency has been reduced to a paralysed body and a single silent tear. What once burned through the film is aestheticised, pathologised, and contained. Seen now, this violent beauty is difficult to trust; it leaves behind both lamentation for the fictional women and rage at the male authorship through which their desire is appropriated. Still, I was struck by the raw force of female desire given such sheer cinematic force in a film from the 1960s.

Several nights later, at a Thursday evening screening of Park Joon-ho​’s 3670 (2025) at the Barbican, the question of where desire can be held arrived somewhere else entirely. Contemporary South Korea appeared through the slick immediacy of digital images. Instead of the globally exported image of South Korean popular culture known as the K‑wave, 3670 looks beneath that polished veneer to foreground the intimate social language of a marginalised gay community. 3670 centres on Cheol-jun (Jo Yoo-hyun), a young North Korean defector newly navigating Seoul​’s gay underground. Guided by his warmhearted, witty companion Yeong-jun (Kim Hyun-mok), Cheol-jun​’s self-exploration unfolds through humour, tact, and the relief of recognition.

The film title itself is a code: 3−6−7−0 is the shorthand for meetups at Seoul​’s Jongno-3-ga station, Exit 6, at 7pm. Here, desire becomes a social language, a way of asking whether belonging can be practised before it is secured. Park captures this with delicate warmth: the resentful yet tender gaze of goodbye, the refusal to meet again because parting hurts too much, or the sharp words used to protect a vulnerable pride. Yet, among these bittersweet moments, the scene I remember most is Cheol-jun​’s ​“not-coming-out-coming-out” moment. Sitting with fellow defectors, Cheol-jun tries to confess, but before the secret can break, one friend cuts him off – ​“Say no more, I already know” – while another gently deflates the tension with clueless confusion, ​“What the hell are you guys talking about? Don​’t leave me behind.” This perfectly timed humour diffuses the heart-wrenching tension I had been holding in my chest. There is no heavy drama here, only the quiet relief of being understood without having to fully explain oneself. Effortlessly funny and tenderly pitched, the moment brings an immediate sense of comfort amid the bittersweetness of queer growth.

From these silent rooms, enclosed interiors, and coded meeting points, the festival​’s first half began to feel less like a sequence of screenings than a series of negotiations over how desire becomes legible. These negotiations would continue elsewhere in the programme, where questions of family, visibility, and recognition returned in more intimate, and sometimes more painful, forms.

Nanthinee Shree

I never expected a posh London cinema to make me feel so close to home. There is a distinct irony to making this claim now, as I clickity-clack away on my keyboard, physically distanced from the complex politics surrounding queer lives in Southeast Asia. Yet, Queer East accomplished the astronomical task of emotionally situating me back in my childhood home in the heartlands of Singapore. My viewing experience spanned an eclectic spectrum of cinema ranging from the poignant Singaporean family drama A Good Child (2025) to a delectable feast of short films featured in the Closed Mouths Don​’t Get Fed programme. Amidst the cacophony of voices, the overarching narrative of queer dichotomies lingered like a persistent ring in my ears long after the screenings ended.

Directed by Ong Kuo Shin, A Good Child follows Jia Hao (Richie Koh), a drag queen who returns to his family home to care for his mother after she is diagnosed with dementia. Inspired by the life of Sammi Zhen, a veteran drag queen in Singapore, this film serves as Ong​’s third cinematic tribute to the local drag landscape. The narrative focus on performance art allows for an aesthetic opulence that permeates almost every aspect of the filmmaking, particularly the costumes, makeup, and lighting. At the same time, the brightly lit scenes and high-camp aesthetics do not diminish the film’s sobering gravitas. A Good Child is one of those films that feels like reading your childhood diary – your darkest thoughts written with a glitter pen. Ong​’s background in directing television series is evident in the teeming melodrama that is laced throughout the film.

Returning to a home that is fraught with bitter memories of parental abuse elucidates Jia Hao​’s physical rejection of a queer space for one that requires him to be the son and man that society wants him to be. Though the film glosses over the realities of queer individuals living with their families, A Good Child features an unorthodox ​‘wedding’ scene where the union is legally void yet emotionally monumental. The poignant declaration of maternal validation by Jia Hao​’s mother, ​“Government doesn’t allow, Mother allows,” did flavour my popcorn salty with my unending stream of tears.

I was also particularly drawn to Closed Mouths Don​’t Get Fed, a programme of shorts curated by Elena Kwa-Hawking that had food at the centre of its theme. Included in the smörgåsbord of shorts is 100% USDA Certified Organic Homemade Tofu (2022) by Gbenga Komolafe, a moving drama about a transwoman reviving her mother​’s Korean restaurant after moving back home to earn money for her breast augmentation surgery. This film served as a compelling accompaniment to the feature films in which queer individuals choose between family or being visibly their authentic selves. 

Apart from themes of familial acceptance and questions of belonging, the rest of the shorts from this selection also underscored the dichotomy of the visible and invisible in queer lives. Etzu Shaw​’s 29 Hour Famine (2024), my favourite of the lot, is a hilarious short about Jenny (Anna Mikami), a devout teenager who polices every member of her church group at the annual fasting event she is heading. The filmmaker frequently employs tense POV shots of Jenny surveilling everyone during the gathering, illustrating her chilling obsession with enforcing behavioural conformity. Ultimately, this desperate urge to monitor her external environment embodies her inability to regulate her own internal turmoil. Her obsession and strict abidance are always met with the nonchalance of Mina (Yeena Sung), the previous year​’s organiser. Mina​’s indifference is not the only thing that irks Jenny; there seems to be something more about her presence that makes her uneasy. In true closeted queer fashion, she finds a totally unrelated hyper fixation to keep that part of her invisible. The climax of the film intercuts close-ups of the church congregation ravenously feasting on an assortment of dishes with scenes of Jenny and Mina messily making out (also commonly known as eating out) in the closet. The juxtaposition is not only comically sharp, but structurally brilliant. It deftly articulates a central dichotomy within the queer experience, contrasting the agonizing weight of enforced invisibility with a liberating exuberance born from self-acceptance.

Shwe Yee Oo’s Unfulfilled Dreams (2025) and Kim Sejin’s Color, Color, Color! (2025) are two other shorts that engaged deeply with the theme of visibility and invisibility. Together, they make for a compelling dialogue. Unfulfilled Dreams is a self-reflexive documentary about the director​’s journey to document the lives of a lesbian street vendor couple in Myanmar. Midway through the process, the couple stops entertaining the director in fear of the attention they were getting from their neighbours and community. Color, Color, Color! is a coming-of-age tale about an introverted girl, Somi, who bails on her date with another girl after getting acutely conscious about the eyes of strangers in South Korea. In Unfulfilled Dreams, the street vendor couple are visually absent from the rest of the film once they return to their mundane routine as naan bread sellers and not stars of a documentary. Meanwhile, the retreat in Color, Color, Color! manifests as a shift in space for Somi: she rushes out of the café in fear of being perceived by other customers. Unlike the lesbian street vendors who choose not to risk exposure in exchange for public visibility, Somi actively confronts her anxieties. Driven by the possibility of a love that mirrors her own quirks, she takes a calculated gamble and returns to find her date at the café. These narrative parallels emphasize how the anticipated social payoff of coming out dictates both the lifepaths of queer people and the ultimate trajectory of each film’s conclusion.

Queer dichotomies, unfortunately, do not always manifest as a privilege of choice. Many individuals are left with no option but to remain invisible or abandon family for survival, for peace, and sometimes simply for happiness. Piercing through the muffled whimpers and belly laughter that filled the cinema was a poignant reminder: queer stories deserve to be told, unapologetically, in every sense.