News

The full programme for the first Queer East Film Festival is announced. The curated series of screenings across London, with accompanying panel events, will explore identity, religion, family, adulthood and politics through queer relationships on screen, specifically from East and Southeast Asia.

Many have seen the significant progress of Lgbtq + rights across the world, but progress in Asia has been mixed. The festival invites everyone in the UK to be part of the discussion and celebrate diverse identities, cultures, and heritages of Asian and Asian diasporic communities who’ve often been excluded from mainstream discourse.

The programme is a mix of classic films and new releases, exploring how culture, law, history, and social norms have affected and built the current Asian queer landscape over 50 years of cinema.

Twenty-nine films, including 6 UK Premieres and 2 London Premieres, from 13 countries across Asia will be screened in cinemas across the capital to foster and...

Being the biggest of its kind in Asia, the Busan International Film Festival offers an excellent showcase for emerging talents from the vast and vastly varied continent. Premiering in the regionally focused section “A Window on Asian Cinema”, the alluring, densely-packed dramatic thriller The Bold, the Corrupt, and the Beautiful makes a case for genre filmmaking in Taiwan, a country audiences worldwide probably associate with the lyrical, contemplative imagery of Hou Hsiao-hsien or Tsai Ming-liang . Thanks in no small part to a sizzling female ensemble (actressexuals: take note), director Ya-che Yang’s third feature shows a snappier side of the island and thoroughly entertains.

Set in the indeterminate past in the tropical metropolis Kaohsiung, the story centers around Madame Tang (Kara Wai) – who ostensibly runs an antiques dealership but mainly acts as a go-between for dirty businessmen and crooked politicians – and her two daughters Ning (Ke-Xi Wu) and Chen...

Prashant Bhargava’s Patang (India-usa) and Mira Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (India-Pakistan-usa) will screen at the Pan-Asia Film Festival, which will take place across ten London venues and several other UK cities from March 6-17, 2013.

Patang will make its UK Premiere at the festival. Bhargava’s debut feature film has been screened at over 25 film festivals worldwide including Berlinale Forum, Tribeca Film Festival and Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles 2012.

Mira Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist opened Venice International Film Festival and Doha Tribeca Film Festival in 2012.

Some of the other films to be screened at the festival are: Gf* Bf* by Ya-Che Yang (Taiwan), Outrage Beyond by Takeshi Kitano (Japan) and The King of Pigs by Yeon Sang-ho (South Korea).