Queer East Festival returns for its seventh edition from 1 May to 6 June 2026, showcasing cinema and performing arts in venues across London. This five-week celebration includes feature films, shorts, documentaries, and moving image work, exploring East and Southeast Asia’s ever-evolving queer landscape.
The festival opens on 1 May at the Barbican with the UK premiere of the landmark 4K restoration of The Outsiders (孽子, dir. Yu Kan-Ping, Taiwan, 1986); the first screen adaptation of Pai Hsien-Yung’s groundbreaking novel Crystal Boys, now restored to include previously censored material and presented in its full, hallucinatory glory.
With screenings hosted at Barbican Centre, BFI Southbank, Centre 151, Genesis Cinema, ICA, Rich Mix, Rio Cinema, The Garden Cinema, Museum of the Home, UCL East Community Cinema, and more, this year’s programme spans fiction and documentary, classic restorations and UK premieres, comprising features and shorts from across Asia and its diaspora communities, including two rare screenings in 35mm.
Yi Wang, Queer East Festival and Programme Director, says: “To look back is a crucial step in understanding how to move forward. This year’s programme 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.”
Highlights of the 2026 programme include:
• The Outsiders (孽子) – Opening Night – a stunning 4K restoration of Yu Kan-Ping’s ground-breaking Taiwanese queer drama
• 3670 – a milestone in South Korean queer cinema portraying the hidden codes of Seoul’s gay scene
• A Useful Ghost (ผีใช้ได้ค่ะ) – a wildly camp debut feature from Thailand skewering the establishment and cultural hypocrisy
• Montreal, My Beautiful – screen icon Joan Chen heads this landmark queer Asian diaspora film
• Between Goodbyes – UK premiere of a poignant documentary about queer adoption and the legacy of Korea’s overseas adoption programme
• Cactus Pears (साबर बोंडं) – from the Beyond Strand, winner of the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize at Sundance 2025
• A Good Child (好孩子) – UK premiere; a hilariously funny and profoundly moving drag comedy from Singapore
• Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia – the resplendent 1989 classic by lesbian cinema pioneer Ulrike Ottinger, screening with a curator introduction and artist discussion
FEATURE FILMS
The features programme brings UK premieres and new releases from 2025. Joonho Park’s 3670 (2025) follows Cheol-jun, a young North Korean defector in Seoul forced to hide his gay identity, who discovers the city’s vibrant gay scene and the behavioural codes that sustain it. The UK premiere of Tracy Choi’s romantic Girlfriends (女孩不平凡, 2025) is set across Macau, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, in which 34-year-old filmmaker Lok revisits different moments in her past to ask what it means to be true to oneself. Nigel Santos’ Open Endings (2025), a UK premiere from the Philippines, follows four queer women, all exes navigating love, sex, and chosen families in a confident, self-aware film about loyalty and the liberating power of non-normative lifestyles. Ong Kuo Sin’s A Good Child (好孩子, 2025), another UK premiere, this time from Singapore, is about a sassy drag queen who reluctantly returns home to care for his mother with dementia. Both hilariously funny and profoundly moving, it features a phenomenal lead performance from rising star Richie Koh.
Documentaries include the UK premiere of Between Goodbyes (2024), directed by Jota Mun, which follows queer Korean adoptee Mieke and her birth mother Okgyun as they seek to reconcile their painful pasts, addressing the historical legacy of mass overseas adoption. Queer as Punk (2024) follows Faris, the transman lead singer of an openly queer Malaysian punk band, and his bandmates Yon and Yoyo, who use their music to fight for LGBTQ+ rights in the face of severe curtailment of human rights and freedom of expression. Holo Wang’s UK premiere A Drop in the Ocean (臨淵入魚, 2025) follows free-diving Taiwanese athletes Hua-Yang Huang and Afa Zhang with mesmerising underwater cinematography. Thunska Pansittivorakul’s Isan Odyssey (อีสานอำพราง, 2026), also a UK premiere, is about Mor Lam folk music, which develops into a searing critique of state repression and political violence. Tianyi Zheng’s hybrid documentary Where Comes Mulan (木蘭何處, 2026) is a UK premiere in which the filmmaker returns to her ancestral village, the fabled hometown of Mulan, excavating cultural mythology through a queer lens.
The features this year showcase camp humour, horror, and political satire. Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s A Useful Ghost (ผีใช้ได้ค่ะ, 2025) is an extraordinary feature debut in which the son of a prominent manufacturing family discovers that his deceased wife has returned as a vacuum cleaner. This wildly camp attack on the Thai establishment, cultural hypocrisy, and political violence is plentiful with queer pleasures. Fatrick Tabada’s UK premiere Flower Girl (2025), from the Philippines, stars Sue Ramirez as a vapid sanitary towel endorser who wakes up, following a supernatural encounter, to find her vagina has vanished; this riotous comedy mercilessly castigates prejudices around sex and gender identity. Ryan Machado’s atmospheric film Raging (Rumaragasa, 2025) is a UK premiere set in the mid-1990s on Sibuyan Island in the Philippines, about a young man who witnesses a mysterious plane crash and begins to confront his own trauma, asking troubling questions about queerness, abuse, and stigma.
Restorations feature heavily in the programme. Along with the opening film, the festival presents Lino Brocka’s Macho Dancer (1988, 4K restoration), which centres on Paul, who leaves his rural village for Manila’s red light district; the film’s strikingly erotic imagery forces us to consider our own desires and complicity as viewers. Screening from a 35mm print, Masahiro Shinoda’s 1965 classic With Beauty and Sorrow (美しさと哀しみと) focusses on a famous painter’s pupil and lesbian lover who vows to take revenge when her former abuser reappears, conjuring a claustrophobic feel through exquisite cinematography and Kyoto locations. Another 35mm print from Japan, Keisuke Kinoshita’s achingly beautiful Farewell to Spring (惜春鳥, 1959) follows five young men whose reunion in their Aizu hometown gives way to conflict and betrayal, offering a glimpse into what queer cinema might have looked like in 1950s Japan.
Classic cinema is represented by Li Youning’s The Spring Outside the Fence (竹籬笆外的春天, 1985) which traces the bond between two women growing up in a military dependants’ village in 1960s Taiwan, with Cherie Chung and Su Ming-Ming giving tremendously affecting performances. Kim Hye-jung’s The Girl Princes (왕자가 된 소녀들, 2011) follows legendary actors of South Korea’s Female Gukgeuk tradition, a form of musical theatre popular in the 1950s in which women played male roles; the film scrutinises cultural tensions around gender performance and disguise. Zhang Ying’s The Fantasy of Deer Warrior (大俠梅花鹿, 1961) is a whimsical Taiwanese curiosity in which actors dress as forest animals, which now carries irresistible queer camp appeal. Kashou Iizuka’s Blue Boy Trial (ブルーボーイ事件, 2025) is a riveting courtroom drama that showcases emerging trans talent. It is based on real events in Tokyo, in 1965, when a doctor was put on trial for carrying out gender reassignment surgery and his lawyer called trans women as witnesses. And finally, powerhouse Asian cinema legend Joan Chen delivers a haunting performance in Xiaodan He’s Montreal, My Beautiful (2025), playing a Chinese immigrant mother who embarks on a journey of forbidden love and overdue self-discovery.
BEYOND PROGRAMME
The festival’s Beyond strand presents work that broadens the festival’s geographical reach into a wider Asian context, Rohan Parashuram Kanawade’s award-winning debut Cactus Pears (साबर बोंडं, 2025) is a bold meditation on grief and the liberating power of sexuality set in rural western India. Ulrike Ottinger’s 1989 classic Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia (1989) follows two European anthropologists taken prisoner on a journey through the Mongolian steppe, who become embroiled in a lesbian love triangle with their captor, the warrior princess Ulan Iga.
The strand also features Plotholes and Detours, a selection of moving image works from Turkey and its diasporas where national narratives slip between registers, as well as Tender Guerillas, a programme bringing together formally restless short films from India that explore queer image-making through self-filming.
SHORT FORM PROGRAMME
In addition to the feature films, Queer East 2026 will present 17 Short Form Programmes consisting of over 90 short films from across Asia and its diasporas.
Excavating the archives of queer cinema, Pixelated Lesbian Mixtape: Azian Nurudin’s Wicked Times (1986-1999) features nine kinky videos from the boundary-pushing Malaysian-American artist. A key cinematic voice from Japan’s subcultural underground, Mari Terashima: Exquisite Tastes brings together three of the artist’s films where violent tendencies and good table manners intertwine. A mini-retrospective of the late Japanese filmmaker Hiroyuki Oki will be held as part of The Erotics of Space: Hiroyuki Oki.
Moving between animation, documentary, and experimental modes, the contemporary films in this strand showcase a diverse range of queer storytelling, from food as a means of transgression in Closed Mouths Don’t Get Fed, to male pregnancy and biopolitics in BodyHacking. Other highlights include CONG/SPIRACY, where camp, satire, and mythology are deployed as strategies for survival in Southeast Asia, and Threads of Passage, which explores the textile industry and its globalised networks of labour and migration through a queer lens.
As part of Queer East’s ongoing commitment to an inclusive, open programming model, many of the events in Short Form and Beyond have been curated by both emerging and established curators and collectives from diverse backgrounds across the UK and beyond. The full Short Form programme, including dates and venues, can be found at queereast.org.uk/festival-2026/.
TALKS, WORKSHOPS, INDUSTRY AND PERFORMANCES
Alongside the film programme, Queer East presents a rich line-up of events including talks, workshops, and live performances. Highlights include Offline Memories, a series inspired by the Hong Kong LGBTQ+ Archive of Printed Matter, shining a light on the city’s pre-Internet queer culture.
Pichet Klunchun’s two-decades-long research into the language of Thai traditional Khon dance culminates in No. 60, a unique performance at The Place that innovates on a 700-year-old legacy. Over at Battersea Arts Centre, interactive performance Bunny uses rope bondage to weave desire, trust, consent and connection between artist and audience. A full day of live performances and a late-night rave unfolds at the Queer East Takeover at the ICA (16 May), featuring hua hua, Riven Ratanavanh, Unlock Dancing Plaza and Princess Xixi.
The second iteration of the Queer East Industry Day takes place at BFI Southbank (24 May), bringing together film professionals from diverse backgrounds to discuss the current challenges in queer and Asian independent film production and exhibition.
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