Queer East at HPPH: Expanding the Frame of Queer Asian Cinema

This November, Hyde Park Picture House hosted a selection of films from Queer East, a festival spotlighting LGBTQ+ cinema from East and Southeast Asia. Five years in, the festival has grown into a go-to for queer stories you almost never see on UK screens. While Western queer cinema has expanded in visibility over the past decade, films from Asia’s LGBTQ+ communities remain far less accessible. Queer East shakes things up by spotlighting films that disrupt neat, fixed ideas of identity and representation. The Leeds programme brings four very different films to the Picture House, each illuminating a facet of queer life rarely foregrounded in mainstream film culture.

Edhi Alice (18/11/25)

Edhi Alice opens the selection, starring Korean trans activist Alice. The film dives into her daily life of organising and creative exploration. The true narrative, however, lies in the messy business of who holds the camera and who gets to talk back. What begins as a portrait of activism soon becomes a negotiation of power as Alice questions the director’s choices, redirects scenes, and refuses any attempt to compress her identity into a neatly formed ‘transition arc.’ A purposeful story develops in moments of friction and intimacy, revealing how trans narratives have historically been mediated and how Alice actively works to reclaim authorship. The film is a living conversation about visibility, agency, and the ethics of looking - a portrait not just of a woman, but of the complicated act of filming her. It points to an ongoing global conversation about who is allowed to define trans experiences on screen.

My Sunshine (26/11/25)

Set on a tiny snow-dusted island in Japan, My Sunshine explores an unlikely romance between a figure skater, Yuki, and a nonbinary fisher, Haru. Their romance develops through small gestures such as learning each other’s routines, sharing meals in silence, and skating on a frozen inlet; the landscape becomes a kind of third character doing half the storytelling. Snow, silence, and isolation (where feelings have expanse to breathe) reflect the tentative openness and the solitude binding them. Beneath the stillness, the film explores Yuki’s fear of returning to the competitive world they fled and Haru’s negotiation of identity within a traditional rural community. With a gorgeously muted palette and emphasis on movement over dialogue, this film offers a form of queer storytelling rooted in quiet revelation rather than grand declaration,  an example of how queer narratives from East Asia often unfold in quieter, more coded ways than those familiar to Western audiences.

Where Is My Love? & Incidental Journey (30/11/25)

The festival wraps up with a Taiwanese double bill that lets two eras of queer cinema talk to each other. Where Is My Love?, one of Taiwan’s earliest queer films, comes from a time when LGBTQ+ representation existed firmly in the margins. The story follows a young man entangled in a secret relationship with a close friend at a time when same-sex desire had to hide behind euphemism and careful choreography. Drama unfolds in private rooms, shadowed alleys, and stolen moments - storytelling shaped by the social constraints of the era.  It documents the emotional reality of queer life before public visibility: a world of longing, misrecognition, and unspoken connection that had to exist between the lines.

This film was paired with Incidental Journey, a more modern look at queer Taiwanese life, to give a brilliant then-and-now snapshot. A queer protagonist sets off on a journey after a breakup. Their travels lead them through queer bars, artistic circles, old friendships, and pockets of community that map out the diversity of modern LGBTQ+ life. Rather than secrecy, the film emphasises mobility, self-reflection, and the everyday textures of chosen family. It is relevant for its openness, a testament to how far Taiwanese society - now home to Asia’s first legal same-sex marriage laws - has come in making space for queer narratives to exist without disguise. Together, they show how queer Asian cinema has evolved not just in visibility, but in the languages of emotion, cinema, and politics, through which desire, community, and selfhood are expressed.

Significance Beyond the Screen

Queer East landing in Leeds says a nice bit about where global cinema is heading. The West has been happily devouring Asian exports from K-pop, anime marathons and Ghibli tattoos to bubble tea in every postcode. However, fascination can often lack understanding. These films push past aesthetics and into the guts and gore of the human experience: history, politics, censorship, family pressure, silence, and survival. They remind us there is no single ‘queer story’, that our ideas shouldn’t be boxed in by Western norms or tidy borders. By offering glimpses into queerness shaped by other histories, borders, and cultural rules, we are shown just how many ways there are to live, love, and imagine life.

Queer East contributes to a growing awareness of how global queer cinema diverges, intersects, and informs audiences. For film audiences in Leeds, it’s a chance to look beyond the usual Western film lens and into cinematic worlds built from entirely different pressures and possibilities. Queer East widens the frame and urges us to think about how identity is shaped by geography, politics, and community, and how these forces differ across cultures.

These films carve out space for voices and experiences that are often sidelined or restricted. Even after the credits roll, the invitation remains: stay curious, stay open, and keep seeking out the stories that push past borders and resist restriction. The world of queer cinema is wider, stranger, and more exhilarating than any single festival can contain - Queer East is a reminder to keep looking beyond the familiar frame.

Words by Safiya Islam, she/her