Birmingham’s Flatpack Film Festival to explore ‘Chinese Queers’

An event entitled Chinese Queers; Diasporic Dykes: Saving Face + Reality Fragment 160921 will be held as part of 2024’s Flatpack Film Festival – a mobile arts organisation which takes over Birmingham venues every May.

Programmed by writer, curator and artist Yifan He, the event will feature a screening of Alice Wu’s Saving Face, which screened at the Sundance Film Festival in 2005, making it the “first mainstream Asian-American lesbian film and a beautiful, underappreciated rom com that navigates tensions between Queer identity and cultural heritage,” explains the event’s information page.

The screening will explore Chinese diasporic lesbian identity through film and share resources. This exploration of queerness and Chinese identity is important in cities such as Birmingham where the Gay Village and Chinese Quarter live side-by-side.

“In addition to Saving Face, interdisciplinary artist April Lin 林森 will present the short film Reality Fragment 160921, a genre-defying mixture of docufiction, experimental narrative, and video art about two people curating their own universe.”

What’s more, guests will “be able to take home a zine by April and Yifan made for the screening, with insights about the films as well as a curated list of other films that represent East Asian lesbians and queer people who experience misogyny.”

The event will be held Saturday, May 11 at 5.45 – 7.45pm at The Mockingbird Cinema. Tickets cost £5-10 and are available to book online now.