Now on its seventh run, the Queer East Festival has firmly established itself as London’s go-to place for East Asian cinema that explores the queer condition.
Participating in the festival’s Future Film Curators Lab, Shimeng Wang presented Acting Up, a series of shorts centred on the relationship between queerness and performance. For many queer people, performance is an unfortunate necessity in an oppressive society, yet performance spaces are often the most accepting, and through artistic performance queer people are afforded an opportunity to express their identities.
The series was eclectic, branching out from that base throughline of ‘performance’ into experimental retellings of Chinese folk tales, realistic dramas, documentaries both makeshift and professionally shot, and indie animations. The first piece, Butterfly Lovers, acquaints audiences with the wild changes in style to come. In just 4 minutes, the model-actors undergo a dozen costume and make-up changes, while audiences are flung back and forth through sets and time periods. Director Lei Jiang prioritised aesthetics over clear storytelling, but given how well-known the titular legend is, any gaps in the plot can easily be filled. As well as establishing the series’ eclecticism, starting with a version of the Butterfly Lovers introduces the link between queerness and performance. In the original folk tale, Zhu Yingtai meets her lover, Liang Shanbo, while disguised as a fellow man.
This link was expanded upon in the series’ two dramatic shorts. In The Red Kiss, teenagers Qian and Vicky prepare for a school play over summer, but they do little rehearsing in their meetups. Lying in bed together, they discuss a ‘kissing scene’ between their characters that one of the two snuck into the script. Yet, even under the guise of performance, they fail to express their love. In one memorable sequence, the pair rehearse while surrounded by castmates, embracing when their scene ends. Qian attempts to initiate a kiss, and Vicky pulls back. As Vicky breaks down in tears, the girls clap and then embrace her—mistaking what they have seen for acting.
A similar failure to express one’s true self through art is seen in The Wind in Ash. When the film starts, Xiaoxiao has just returned home after studying photography abroad, where they began to engage with their non-traditional gender identity. Back in an environment where they cannot be seen, and where they are expected to perform an identity that is not their own, their photos show partly obscured, often faceless bodies. In spaces where it is not acceptable, these characters may be tempted to express their queerness via performance, yet they struggle to go through with it.
But the series is not singularly concerned with misery, and the attempts shown to display queerness on stage do not always fail. Both documentaries the series included strive to display performance spaces that have become hubs of queer joy. The charmingly unpolished short Chengdu Rainbow centres on Matthew, the founder of a struggling LGBT nonprofit. Although he discusses the difficulty of running events and how frequently they are cancelled, one memorable scene shows a queer film festival succeed and prompt lively discussion from audiences.
Sotong, which follows drag queens affected by a police raid on Malaysia’s REXKL culture hub, spends much of its runtime discussing the importance of clubs to the country’s drag scene and how drag informs the queens’ identities. Of the two shorts, Chengdu Rainbow is more successful at capturing queer joy. There is a scene in Sotong where one queen complains that the media only reach out to them when they want to falsely portray their lives as tragic. Sotong tries to avoid this, but a film about attempts to censor drag can only go so far here, and the inclusion of this scene feels like a false apology. Sotong’s sleek editing and cinematography also work against the film, preventing scenes of queens kiki-ing from feeling as intimate as anything Chengdu Rainbow presents in its vlog-like style.
The series’ last film was also its lightest. In Someone Special, Lisa’s desperation to date a girl she met online leads her to lie that she can speak Vietnamese, using Google Translate to keep up the facade. Determined to make the date go well, she resolves to learn the language before meeting her crush. After several films dealing with discrimination, this is a welcome relief. The film takes full advantage of its medium, making jokes only possible in animation—in one sequence, a mascot resembling the Duolingo owl floats above Lisa, holding her at gunpoint so that she will meet her language goals. Potentially upsetting topics are mentioned.
Lisa doesn’t bother asking certain Vietnamese family members for help as they don’t accept her orientation. But the film refuses to give these topics weight. Despite the pressure Lisa feels to pretend to be someone else, the ending affirms that queer love can survive without this performance. This film was a crowd favourite. Although, as I left the cinema, I heard two girls debate whether Google Translate could really trick a native speaker.
To find out more about Queer East, visit their website.
Images (in order of appearance): Sotong, Someone Special, The Red Kiss. All courtesy of Queer East.
