The 2021 Queer East Film Festival opened at the Showroom cinema on Friday the 3rd with a 35mm screening of Ryōsuke Hashiguchi’s Hush! (2001). Though 20 years old, the film anticipates many of the debates around same-sex couples and parenthood which persist today, not just in Asia, but worldwide. It’s a testament to the manner in which film festivals can be sensitive towards – and respond to – contemporary concerns, even when they aren’t premiering new releases.
The Queer East Film Festival was established in 2020 with the aim of “encouraging more inclusive narratives.” Writing on their website, the organisers assert that “film is one of the most direct and accessible mediums able to shine a light on issues and situations that people just weren’t aware of before.” Cinema has always exerted a great degree of influence over its audience – there is, for example, the oft-reported and perhaps apocryphal notion that after Clark Gable was filmed bare-chested in 1934’s It Happened One Night, sales of men’s undershirts fell anywhere between 40 – 80%.
The Queer East Film Festival might struggle to have quite so dramatic an effect on the public at large in what is only its second year, but it’s certain to have an impact on all of its attendees. The programme airing in the Showroom continued with Chang Yu-Chieh’s Dear Tenant (2020) from Taiwan, and Lim Dae-Hyung’s Moonlit Winter (2019) from South Korea. Both films enabled viewers to engage with stories and perspectives that they may have never seen authentically represented on-screen.
There’s something undeniably moving about seeing a director’s work appreciated by an audience who were, in all likelihood, completely unaware of the film before a festival like Queer East thrust it into the limelight once again. Hush! was warmly received by an enthusiastic audience following an introduction from festival director & programmer Yi Wang, who contextualised Hashiguchi’s work for this Western audience to whom he was likely an unfamiliar name. Hush!, he informed us, was the last in Hashiguchi’s trilogy revolving around LGBT characters, and the director (who is gay himself) has a keen desire to depict LGBT life on-screen as authentically and affectionately as possible. There’s a specificity to Hush! which is absent in many LGBT films directed by straight filmmakers, and a palpable fondness and compassion for its characters which prevents even more minor figures from lapsing into stereotype. I left the cinema feeling, above all, grateful to Queer East. Reviewer Iana Murray (who simply goes by ‘iana’ on Letterboxd), gave the film 4.5/5 stars in February of this year, writing: “cherishing this rewatch for when it becomes impossible to find again.”
It’s hard not to share her sentiment. Even more mainstream foreign cinema often proves difficult to access in the UK – finding films which are both foreign and dedicated to depicting the lives of minorities is nigh on impossible. As such, it’s a genuine, and actually rather startling, delight to see how extensive Queer East’s programming has been this year – the touring season has run from October to December, stopping in: Cardiff; Manchester; Birmingham; Nottingham; Reading; Edinburgh, and finally Sheffield. One can only ardently hope that the profile of this most vital of festivals will continue to grow.
Queer East raises awareness of the LGBT experience on a global level, reminds us of how important it is to see minorities fairly and affectionately represented on-screen, and dismantles any stereotypes viewers might hold about the LGBT experience in non-western countries. It’s an example of a film festival at its most powerful, guaranteed to make you laugh, make you cry, and most crucially: make you think.