From the tenacious roars of 60s art subcultures in Tokyo, Japan to the spine-chilling, prayer-like whispers of contemporary Southeast Asian cinema, queer lives have always been found at the center of artistic reflections of cultures and histories. With this edition Asian Movie Night is exploring how to engage with our (queer) pasts and what we see in the (queer) stories told by those that came before us.
Who has been made present and who has been left wanting by the sidelines?
What happens at the intersections of queerness with national identity, culture, community and state?
Sanguine Specters Stick to the Skin is a reflection on past and contemporary cinematic depictions of queer lives and histories and the cultural heritages that we carry with us.
Screening in CAVIA
Before the screening in CAVIA, Ko-Yu (Sara) Huang, a Taiwan-born interdisciplinary artist based in the Netherlands, presents an intimate serving of nostalgia and relearning — Tied Beancurd Knots and Seaweed Knots with homemade Sha-Cha Sauce (沙茶醬). This cold platter features soy-and-spice-braised beancurd and seaweed knots — ingredients that literally “tie” together, but whose meaning goes beyond the culinary. The word “結” (knot) can suggest connection, fate, or entanglement.
After the screening, Eastern Playgrounds keeps us tied up with a karaoke after party and a mahjong parlour at the cinema room of Cavia. Born from a desire for joy that centers Asian identities, their priority as a Queer/Asian-centered initiative is to carve out a space for a community to exist and grow while celebrating individual identities that never neatly fit into one way of being Asian.
Performance by
Qiaochu Guo
three sentences
The performance is about the blocked waterway, intergenerational disease, choking throat, words left unsaid. Veiled expressions, the coming out that never considered the possibility.
'Mom's instrument has a mute, I hear it crying carefully when she practices it. She always talks to the wall shaped like a human figure. She has been losing her words for thirty years.'
The screening in FOCUS will be accompanied by a short performance by artist Sol Enae Lee.
She invites us into a collaborative reading performance of the text:
You may call me a big mermaid from your stomach.
Inspired by queer‑feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa's interview, Sol Enae Lee has woven the words and sentences of Anzaldúa into a short poetic text—translating between Korean and English, allowing for poetic mutations that echo and respond to Anzaldúa's concept of Borderlands/La Frontera: a space of multiplicity, transformation, and identity in flux.
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Drawing workshop Scene & Seen
After the screening at FLORA.
‘Scene & Seen: A’ is a hands-on workshop that explores the concept of Asianness through the lens of Asian cinema, using film as a catalyst to examine and reinterpret cultural identity. Participants will engage with iconic scenes, objects, and moments from film to create experimental visual responses—doodles, sketches, and compositions—that reflect their impressions and lived experiences. As part of the Asian Movie Night Seasonal Festival, this session invites participants to reimagine the boundaries of Asianness through color, texture, and form, transforming fleeting cinematic images into personal visual definitions of culture.
PROGRAM of CAVIA Amsterdam
Saturday 30.08.2025
20:00 Doors open
20:00 - 21:00
Eastern Playgrounds: Taiwanese food by Sara
21:00 - 21:15
Performance by Qiao Chu Guo
21:30 - 22:30 Asian Movie Night: A selection of queer shorts
23:00 - 03:00 Eastern Playgrounds: karaoke after party x mahjong parlour
TICKETS
Entry on donation (Cineville card valid)
CAVIA
PROGRAM of
FOCUS Arnhem
19:00 - 19:05 Introduction
19:05 - 20:00 Screening
20:00 - 20:15 Performance by Sol Enae Lee
TICKETS
€12.00 (Student €5.00)
Cineville card free
FOCUS
PROGRAM of
KINO Rotterdam
21:00 - 21:05 Introduction
21:05 - 21:10 Director’s introduction
21:10 - 22:35 Bye Bye Love screening
TICKETS
€13.20 (CJP/Student €10.00)
Cineville card free
KINO
PROGRAM of
FLORA Den Haag
19:00 - 19:05 Introduction
19:05 - 21:10 Việt and Nam screening
21:10 End
TICKETS
€12.00 (Student
€
8.50)
Cineville card free
FLORA
ABOUT
Eastern Playgrounds is an Amsterdam-based Queer/Asian-led collective. Through hosting community events with Asian board games, mahjong workshops and karaoke sessions, they create space for connection and belonging through playfulness and joy.
Qiaochu Guo (they/he) is a multidisciplinary artist and performer in slow mobility, born in Jingmen, China and living in Amsterdam, navigating between art spaces/ fields/ hometowns. They have interests in the body as a living archive of the established social structure: alienation, abandonment, exhaustion and disease, and leads to play with the autonomy of hacking, defeating, disrupting and restoring. His work is often an interweaving of installation, drawings, videos and performances.
Sol Enae Lee describes herself as a spatial poet. Her practice centres on translation — not only in the linguistic sense, but as a way to articulate what lies beyond words. She approaches translation as a medium in its own right, using language, sound, and space to shape meanings and environments that invite those who encounter her work to feel as much as understand.
Curator
Kleopatra Vorria is an artist that deals in stories. Her favorite movie last month was Flow (2024)
Supported by
Arnhem Gemeente, Het Cultuurfonds and Asian Pride
Bye Bye Love
Isao Fujisawa | 1974 | Japan | 85’
Japanese w/ English subs
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This is the
only full-length feature film made at his own expense by Isao Fujisawa, who was
an assistant director at Toei at the time, having worked on Hiroshi
Teshigahara's “Woman in the Dunes” and “The Face of Others”. Influenced by pop
art, and the French New Wave, this is a unique love story of an outlaw couple's
escapades when faced with the faded promises of their counterculture era. A
bizarre world created by the dazzling primary colors and psychedelic images of
the 1970s, Utamaro and Giiko wander in search of freedom, liberation and
transformation. Where will they end up?
With a
theme that was ahead of its time, this is a hidden gem of independent film made
on the tails of Japanese New Wave, showing the first traces of a new queer
cinema. The film had been long considered lost, but in 2018 the original
negative was discovered in a warehouse and a new print was made.
Việt and Nam
Truong Minh Quy | 2024 | Vietnam | 124’
Vietnamese w/ English subs
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Nam and Viet love each other. Both are miners, working 1000 meters below ground where danger awaits and darkness prevails. Coal earns them a living, while polluting the land and the sea. Black sea. Black coal. Burnt coal. Wet coal. Dusty coal. When Nam decides to leave the country via an agent who smuggles people in shipping containers, it causes a rift between his love for Viet and the desires for his own future.
If You See Something That Doesn’t Look Right
Wong Ka Ki, Vincent Ip | 2024 | Hong Kong, Ukraine | 5’
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Two girls from two different worlds - they meet in the underground and try to heal their wounds, both physically and mentally, via their fantasies towards one another.
Spring Will Come
Marion Hoang Ngoc Hill | 2024 | Vietnam, US | 15’ | Vietnamese w/ English
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Saigonese DJ Van Anh and her girlfriend Ly are struggling to end their relationship. Then a strange woman shows up to free the spirit of her long lost Father from their apartment.
Memori Dia
Asarela Orchidia Dewi | 2023 | Indonesia | 18’ | Bahasa Indonesian w/ English subs
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Triggered by an old family photograph, a young adult named Azka retraces their childhood - a sacred stage of life when they became aware of the external world around them and their inner self. While revisiting these long-forgotten memories, Azka discovers unresolved pains they never knew existed. This revelation marks a new beginning, one that unfolds the tapestry of profound self-embrace and acceptance, allowing Azka to move forward unapologetically into their truest essence.
The Deity Yet to Be Seen
Junn Zhou | 2024 | Netherlands | 14’ | Mandarin w/ English subs
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A re-enactment of the legend of the white serpent (白蛇传), an ancient Chinese folktale, the film traces a serpent spirit through its transformative states of gender and identity. It evolves from a formless being to a man, woman, both, and neither.
