Film Programme

Meanwhile, in Cinema 2, it feels like everything is moving, towards or against or away, longing to meet in strange places. The looping shorts programme ‘Fast Crawl, Slow Draws’ will feature:

Mobile Men (2008) by Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Every Vibe Shift Is In God’s Hand (2025) by Virtue Village
Cadence of a Prayer (2026) by Moses Tan
LOVE EXERCISE (7-mins version, 2013) by Fuyuhiko Takata
Dancing Thongkham (2026) by Jessada Chan-yaem
Acid Green (2023) by EXYL
Mien Man (2024) by Nguyen Le Hoang Phuc
Bêtes Éternelles (2022) by Harit Srikhao
NGGAK!!! (2024) by Oktania Hamdani and Winner Wijaya
Boulders (2026) by Oat Montien
Thundergod (2025) by Umi Ishihara

Queer East hosts a special takeover at the ICA, featuring an all-day line-up of film, performance, and practice-based workshops culminating in a club night. Chasing the dizzying ecstasy of movement in all its eclectic potential, this experimental, multidisciplinary showcase will unfold throughout the venue, concocting a sensory mixed bill of bold sounds, moving image, and haptic intimacies.

In the theatre, Hong Kong-based dance company Unlock Dancing Plaza presents a double bill by Joseph Lee and Paula Wong, examining the body politics of spectatorship through playful subversion of everyday gestures. The line-up also features shibari artist hua hua, multidisciplinary artist Riven Ratanavanh, queer collective CD3 and experimental choreographer Osamu Shikichi, with each performance engaging with the errant vitality of queerness in their own inimitable way.

A looping shorts programme will display works by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Umi Ishihara, and Oat Montien, among others. Audiences can slip in and out of these scenes of filmic velocity in the cinema and witness counter-choreographic eruptions in the theatre throughout the day, traversing interconnected themes like the poetics of migration, trespassed borders, unfettered desiring and the necessity of movement for survival.

Audiences will be invited to explore shibari as a mindful and sensual practice through a workshop led by hua hua. This happens alongside a range of other cross-disciplinary workshops led by Pubis Project, Sun Park, Chiemi Shimada, Kayla Lui and Doreen Chan, spanning fantasy stamp-making, cosmotechnical filmmaking, life drawing that undermines established systems of gazing, and a dream-based cocktail mixer.

Building to a fiery, moonlit climax, we will shed skins and dance hard to the beats of Flow (海纳百川), a multidisciplinary club and performance programme curated by celebrated DJ-artist Sirui Chang (Princess Xixi).

Performance and Workshop Programme

Good Boy, Bad Girl: A Double Bill by Joseph Lee and Paula Wong
In this double bill, the artists work through regimes of conditioning, endurance and display, foregrounding the body as something trained, exposed and consumed.

The Language of Rope and REANIMATED by hua hua
Shibari artist hua hua guides you on the language of rope, exploring how to create a dialogue, build tension and express our desires.

UNTITLED by Riven Ratanavanh
Ratanavanh presents a new live performance exploring transformations within the intimate realm.

The Application by CD3 Project
The Application is a transdisciplinary performance piece that transforms both the digital and the stage into a live laboratory to interrogate digital intimacy, consent, and power dynamics.

Crucified Stars on the Tongue by Osamu Shikichi
Shikichi references “舌読 / Zetsudoku,” a technique developed by people with Hansen’s disease in Japan after World War II, in their attempt to find light within darkness by using their tongue as a third hand.

Collective Divination and Filmmaking by Sun Park and Chiemi Shimada
Drawing on cosmotechnics, this workshop uses tarot and oracle cards as methods for engaging with deep intuition so as to spark the collective creation of a new moving image work shot on analogue film. This workshop is made possible by the support of On8mil.

Books in the Diasporic: Imaginary Habitats and Away ༄ with Pubis Project
Join Pubis Project in this writing and making workshop to create from scratch a personal book stamp for a publication that has travelled with you across space and time.

Keep Staring: Life drawing at the theatre with Kayla Lui
This is a life drawing session with the explicit aim of subverting the role of audience and performer. In the meta spirit of interactive theatre and Terayama, it’s time for your butts to leave the audience seat and reimagine the scene.

The Language of Rope and REANIMATED by hua hua
Shibari artist hua hua guides you on the language of rope, exploring how to create a dialogue, build tension and express our desires.

Sipping Dreams [小酌一夢] by Doreen Chan
Originally commissioned by Tai Kwun Contemporary as a virtual event, Sipping Dreams will be staged as an in-person interactive cocktail mixer at Queer East DAYTRIP. 

The desire of material fetishism rarely includes a fetishisation of its production. For example, the rubber catsuit, potent with visceral sensualities, hides the conditions of the agrarian class, the biological miracle of the laticifer cell, or the blood of tumultuous histories. But a real fetishist leaves no stones unturned in their obsession. For them, desire does not exist without a rubber suit which does not exist without the rubber plantation which does not exist without colonial projects in Southeast Asia which does not exist without—

Taking the transformative potential of the material fetish as a starting point, this programme intrudes into the typically veiled processes of fetishisation and opens up the political, historical, industrial and emotional conditions of a fetish’s construction. The (moving image, porn, music video) works in this programme point towards the fluxes of material desires, and the interconnectedness of things.

The line-up includes Terayama Shuuji, Samak Kosem, Lady Hinako, Ari Angkasa & Serena Arsletta, Chulayarnnon Siriphol, Trương Minh Quý, and a live performance by shibari artist Hua Hua and DroneLarvae.

Queer East 2025 … Rio Cinema … Total runtime: 100 mins

This event at the ICA London celebrates the semicentennial of Shūji Terayama’s film Pastoral: To Die in the Country (Den-en ni shisu, 1974). Pastoral is a playfully painful, shrewdly surreal investigation into the mutability of memory & identity. At the foot of Mt. Fear, in a fever dream idyll of the countryside, a boy longs to escape a present that never was.

A screening of the film will be preceded by a polyphonic recital of Terayama’s poetry, co-directed by Kaisa Saarinen and Alan Fielden & in collaboration with performance artist Noe Iwai. The dialogue of poetry and cinema in Pastoral will be expanded into a trilogue of forms through this hybrid performance.

Curated by Kaisa Saarinen … ICA London … Total runtime: 120 mins

Part screening event, part immersive bondage endurance test, this licentious line-up of films is most appropriately experienced in the discomfort of rope restraints. Side effects may include rope burns, and also finding out that all things under heaven are inextricably and disconcertingly tied up in each other. The former stings but the latter would injure you permanently. Don’t let this wound heal, may it impart to you the sneaky ability of sensing from a subordinated position. Doing so would not only startle the freedom/subjugation dichotomy, but could also, if your lucky stars align, lead to the hallowed arrangement of ‘topping from the bottom’. There’s something sexy to be found beyond rights and evils, but first you have to resist resisting. 

Some audience members may volunteer to be bound for the entire duration of the event.

The line-up includes Fuyuhiko Takata, Joon Goh, Chi-Wen Ting, E8 and Janice Kei, Zheng Bo and Caviar to the General.

Queer East 2024 … Ugly Duck … Total runtime: 90 mins

‘Feature’ is an event series inviting interactions between the worlds of art, poetry, and performance. This edition welcomed Katrina Palmer, Carl Gent, Jordan/Martin Hell, and Bart Seng Wen Long. The series is curated by Rory Cook and Alan Fielden.

I presented ‘out in the world’ in a different format for this event — the film was projected both on a screen and onto the rubbery face of a gimp.

Feature by Monitor Books … Cafe OTO … Total runtime: 10 mins

A series of short films and artist moving images that work intimately and unapologetically with and through stereotypical elements of racialised East and South East Asian media, leading to lubricious slippages and unexpected relationships between the filmmakers and the motifs they consort with. It’s like chancing upon a seedy late-night cinema hall only to find the films they show to be uncanny subversions of the usual classics, where even the cliché perverse finds itself perverted further more. 

The line-up includes Gabriela Serrano, Michio Okabe, Mari Terashima, Calleen Koh and Su Hui-Yu

Queer East 2023 … Prince Charles Cinema … Total Running Time: 85 mins