The film screening of 'Queer' Asia Film Festival 2022. Multiple films will be screened and the event is open to the public.
Our fifth annual “Queer” Asia Film Festival (QAFF) of 2022 invites you to reflexively, critically, and creatively engage with us in the conversation on the theme of “SURVIVAL”. The Festival will be held in early July 2022 in various central London locations. Global Exchanges is proud to work with QAFF on the screening in Oxford!
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought unprecedented uncertainty to our lives, ranging from disruption of our daily lives to the intensification of systemic oppressions, government surveillance, and the shutting of international borders. In the meantime, the emerging global political unrest, the rise of nationalism and imperialism, and the urgency of the climate crisis have further restricted our mobility and threatens our survival.
“We were never meant to survive” – emphasises Audre Lorde in “A Litany for Survival”, her work exploring the precarity of marginalised communities often forced to live in silence and fear, lacking even the capacity and luxury to dream. Yet, as Lorde remarks at the end of the poem, “it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive”.
This year’s film festival will explore queer ‘survival’ in our difficult times. How do LGBTQI+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex) individuals and communities navigate their everyday living conditions at the intersections of the pandemic, queerness, and different forms of hierarchies, crises, controls, and discriminations, including heterosexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, etc.? How do we transgress global normativities, including the hegemonic discourse of temporality and space, challenge national and colonial ideologies, and manifest the impossibility of queer hopes, desires, and dreams? How do we revisit our past, create our present, and imagine the possibility and potentiality of queer futurity? Let us embark on the exploration of the glorious power of queer art of SURVIVAL.
As an annual celebration of films from across Asia, including Asian diasporas, QAFF has showcased a wide diversity of films from across Asia, including Azerbaijan, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Japan, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Myanmar, The Philippines, Pakistan, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey and Viet Nam. QAFF has also collaborated with different organisations, including The British Museum, Club Kali, CINEMQ, SOAS, University of London, University of Warwick, King’s College London.