Queer East Festival 2026 London Interview With Yi Wang
'Queer as Punk'
Courtesy of Berlin Film Festival/Queer as Punk
-
Share on Facebook
-
Share on X
-
Google Preferred
-
Share to Flipboard
-
Show additional share options
-
Share on LinkedIn
-
Share on Pinterest
-
Share on Reddit
-
Share on Tumblr
-
Share on Whats App
-
Send an Email
-
Print the Article
-
Post a Comment
London’s Queer East Festival is back for its seventh edition, showcasing cinema and performing arts in venues across the British capital from May 1 to June 6.
The annual exploration of East and Southeast Asia’s ever-evolving queer landscape will kick off at the Barbican with the U.K. premiere of the landmark 4K restoration of the 1986 Taiwanese film The Outsiders, the first screen adaptation of Pai Hsien-Yung’s groundbreaking novel Crystal Boys, which was directed by Yu Kan-Ping. The restored version includes previously censored material, with the Queer East Festival vowing to present it “in its full, hallucinatory glory.”
Related Stories
Movies
Pedro Pascal Fights Back Tears During 'Mandalorian and Grogu' Event in Mexico
TV
'Big Bang Theory' Spinoff 'Stuart Fails to Save the Universe' Reveals First Look
Among other highlights of the seventh edition include the likes of Park Joon-ho’s 3670, which the fest calls “a milestone in South Korean queer cinema, portraying the hidden codes of Seoul’s gay scene,” Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s feature debut and Thailand’s international Oscar submission A Useful Ghost, a Thai feature skewering “the establishment and cultural hypocrisy,” Xiaodan He’s Montreal, My Beautiful, starring screen icon Joan Chen in a cinematic journey of self-discovery, Jota Mun’s Between Goodbyes, as documentary about queer adoption and the legacy of South Korea’s overseas adoption program, and Tracy Choi’s coming-of-age drama Girlfriends.
Also part of Queer East 2026 are the likes of Kuo-Sin Ong’s Singapore drag comedy A Good Child, Nigel Santos’ Open Endings, a drama about four queer women navigating love, sex and chosen families, Yihwen Chen’s Queer as Punk, a documentary about a punk band, led by a trans man, in Malaysia where being LGBTQ+ is criminalized, lesbian cinema pioneer Ulrike Ottinger’s 1989 classic Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia, and Cactus Pears, Rohan Kanawade’s debut feature and winner of the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize at Sundance 2025.
‘Girlfriends,’ courtesy of Queer East Festival
Alongside the film program, Queer East presents talks, workshops, live performances and a late-night rave on May 16. Also, the second iteration of the Queer East Industry Day at BFI Southbank on May 24 will bring together film professionals from diverse backgrounds to discuss “the current challenges in queer and Asian independent film production and exhibition.”
About this year’s mix of features and shorts from across Asia and its diaspora communities and its mix of newer and older movies, Queer East Festival program director Yi Wang said: “To look back is a crucial step in understanding how to move forward. This year’s program places a strong focus on queer cinema heritage, featuring a series of screenings with 35mm prints, stunning 4K restorations, and rare archival materials spanning over six decades of queer filmmaking across Asia. While sometimes overlooked, these films hold the collective memory of our communities, and by bringing them to the big screen again, we want to create a space for dialogues between our queer past and today’s audiences.”
THR talked to the festival programmer about the lineup for the Queer East Festival 2026, how the fest came about and how it has grown since then.
Why and how did you decide to found the Queer East Festival? And how far do you feel you have come?
The idea of creating Queer East was quite personal. I was actually working in performing arts, such as theater amd dance production, and didn’t really have a direct connection with film. But as someone who immigrated to London [from Taiwan] back in 2014 to do my master’s degree and someone who is always very keen on queer cinema, I didn’t really see a lot of East and Southeast Asian queer cinema. We see quite a lot of classics, such as Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together and Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet. But it’s quite rare to see more contemporary Asian cinema. And I just had this idea to do that if no one’s doing it.
Queer East programming director Yi Wang
I just didn’t want to do it by myself. I approached people, talked to different cinema curators and then put together this idea of Queer East that was originally planned for April 2020. Obviously, there was the pandemic. So, we couldn’t really do the festival as we had originally intended, but we had online screenings and still managed