Queer East 2024 at Showroom Cinema
Tom Grieve, Cinema Editor
The Queer East festival is back at Showroom this November with another boundary-pushing selection of LGBTQ+ work sourced from East and Southeast Asia and its diaspora communities. A reliably radical time at the movies, the screenings in Sheffield form part of a nationwide touring season Queer East on the Road 2024.
There are four films showing this year, starting with Love Bound (Sat 9 Nov), a documentary about LGBTQ+ activist Qiuyan Chen and her experience with her tutors, parents and the Chinese government when she waged a legal battle against homophobic university textbooks. The film is directed by Shanshan Chen, and follows Qiuyan as she moves to the UK, where her struggles continued as she worked to build a community to support queer East Asian people. The screening will be followed by an in-person Q&A with guests to be announced.
On Thursday 14 November, Asgog is a tragicomic screwball abnout a non-binary schoolteacher and comedian travelling across the Philippines to compete in a drag beauty pageant. With a non-professional cast, Seán Devlin’s unconventional road movie is abilled as both an empowering queer fairy-tale and a profound, politically-charged ode to the power of solidarity. Make sure to take your seats early as the film will be preceded by a recorded introduction from the film’s protagonist, Jaya.
The season is rounded out by two retrospective screenings, starting with Bye Bye Love (Sat 16 Nov), a poetic, surreal work that was considered lost until a negative was rediscovered in a warehouse in 2018. The 1974 film from director Isao Fujisawa (who has also recorded an introduction) has been compared stylistically to the works of Jean-Luc Godard and Arthur Penn and follows two young people on a doomed summer road through Japan.
Lastly, we’re most excited for the chance to see Taiwanese New Wave director Tsai Ming Liang’s shocking, subversive family drama The River back on the big screen on Thursday 21 November. A sly, queer critique of the nuclear family, this 1997 Berlin Silver Bear winner stars Tsai’s muse Lee Kang-Sheng in a typically outré slice of slow cinema from one of the true master filmmakers of the last few decades.
