The First Queer Film Festival, and Its Week on the Run in Shanghai

"Queer," in English, first meant strange, out of the ordinary — a synonym for "odd." In the 20th century, because of where the word came from and the climate around it, it turned into a slur for homosexuals. Radicals later took it back as an umbrella word for everyone who isn't heterosexual, keeping its ironic edge.

On September 16, a weekend, with the light already going, there weren't many people at Shanghai University's Vancouver Film School — and most of those who were there were heading for Screening Room 406 in Teaching Building No. 1. The first Shanghai Queer Film Festival was about to open.

At 5:30 pm the audience began to file in. The room seats 150, and quite a few latecomers ended up squeezed into the aisle.

The opening ceremony started at 6:30 pm. The Shanghai Vancouver Film School was one of the festival's supporters: besides the venue, it supplied the film workshops and the instructors who taught them. Luis Calandre, the school's associate dean of academics, welcomed the audience with a line from the director Ang Lee: "Film is a way of understanding yourself and understanding the world."

Ting, the curator, looked moved on stage. "Our team is more than thirty people. They're all volunteers, nobody is paid. We prepared this festival together for almost a year. Without them there would be no festival."

A year earlier, a festival that ran this smoothly was not what Ting had expected.

Ting is 24 this year. In a white T-shirt and jeans, she moved between the staff and the audience. "Ting" is the pinyin of one character in her real name; she did not want her real name in a published report. As curator, every time she thought about whether the festival could keep going, she found herself facing a choice she couldn't quite put into words: promote it hard to draw a bigger audience, or stay quiet for the sake of "safety"?

A week before the opening, Ting got bad news about a venue. The place booked for the second day of the festival, where the shortlisted films in the short-film competition were to screen, had cancelled on her.

The films contained fairly explicit sex scenes, and the venue told Ting: "This film you're showing — we don't really dare show it." That may have had nothing to do with the people the Queer Film Festival represents. China has no film rating system, so it is no surprise that plain sex scenes would make a host nervous.

Either way, Ting and her team had to start hunting for a replacement at the last minute. They eventually reached the more open-minded Shanghai British Centre.

Look closely at the listings in the festival programme and you'll see that the screenings moved every day like a guerrilla unit — not just to different addresses, but across different districts of Shanghai: a campus, a consulate, a restaurant, a bar.

On September 18, the festival's third day, Such Is Life screened in a coworking space near the Bund. The room was long and narrow, and Ting's colleagues put up a screen and a projector at one end. As a place to watch a film, it had problems: the seats weren't raked, so people at the back had their view blocked, and they sat too far away to read the subtitles.

Screening Room 406 at the Vancouver Film School, where the opening ceremony was held, already counted as a well-equipped venue, and things still went wrong there. When the opening documentary, Orientations, was projected, the image was too big for the screen, and the audience at the back couldn't read the subtitles either. Ting had to pick up a microphone and tell them that anyone who couldn't see was welcome to move down front.

Asked why she wanted to run a queer film festival, Ting said: "As part of this community myself, one thing I feel strongly is that I often can't find films on the subject. My purpose in starting the festival was that there are too few images we recognize ourselves in. In mainstream cinema you basically never see an Asian queer face."

Ting studied film as an undergraduate. After graduating she worked as a producer at an advertising agency. Three years ago she met her ex-girlfriend, who was volunteering at Shanghai Pride, and that brought her into the circle. She went from taking part to organizing.

She began thinking about something: "Shanghai has a lot of events, all kinds of them, but not many that mainly serve Chinese people." In the interview Ting stressed that this was not about pushing out the Western queer community. It is that films about the Asian queer community are missing to a degree that is hard to ignore.

Beyond filling that gap, Lao U, the festival's programmer, thinks finding Asian queer images does something else useful: "We're talking about how a person is socialized. If you grow up in a closed environment, you don't go through that process, and naturally there are a lot of ideas you never learn. How is a queer person supposed to know that what he feels for someone of that gender is love, if he has no way to find out? In that sense queer film means something. It has to teach these people."

That may explain the theme of the first Queer Film Festival, which ran through both the short-film competition and the main programme: the search for an Asian queer face. Every film was legally licensed, obtained from its producers or its director.

The opening slot went to two documentaries shown back to back, both by the same director, Richard Fung, now a professor at the Ontario College of Art and Design. In 1980 he founded an organization in Canada called Gay Asians Toronto.

In 1986 Fung made a documentary called Orientations: Lesbian and Gay Asians. In it he found several Asian gay men and lesbians who talked on camera about first recognizing their sexual orientation, and who answered the stereotype that all gay people are white. Thirty years later he made Re:Orientations, going back to the same people to record how their lives had changed in between, and what they think about LGBTQIA questions now.

"Watching the first one, I noticed that what those Asian Canadians were able to say in 1986 sounds a lot like what you can say in Shanghai today — there's that kind of time lag. But watching the second one, I found that some of the ideas they talk about may not have any counterpart in Shanghai now. I feel like Shanghai today is wedged somewhere in the middle of those thirty years," Tris, an audience member, told QDaily.

Tris is 21, a senior in economics. He first heard about the festival on Moments, and went to the opening out of curiosity about how queer communities live in other Asian countries. The opening documentaries, he said, hit him hard.

The festival ran eight days, and Tris came to five of them, which makes him an unusually keen participant. For a long time he had no LGBTQIA social circle at all, online or off, until he went to the United States on exchange in 2015 and saw how much LGBTQIA activity there was there. Back in Shanghai he went looking for something similar, and found Shanghai Pride — every June, LGBTQIA people from all over, along with others who care about the issue, come to Shanghai for what is called China's largest and earliest queer festival.

But Shanghai Pride has never been large. The first edition, in 2009, drew 3,000 people; in 2016 it drew 6,500.

The Shanghai Pride Film Festival, then, is even less well known. "A lot of people around me have no idea it exists. I think that's because they keep their own publicity low-key too," Tris said.

Xiao Ming, another audience member this year, came to four days of the programme. He hadn't expected the festival to be run so "properly" — the shape of the programme and the quality of the selection both felt more like a traditional, established film festival. "Even though it's all queer subject matter, the films Pride picks can be uneven."

Xiao Ming watched 15 shorts at the Shanghai British Centre. Like Tris, he said they hit him hard: he "saw his own past in fragments from different films."

"After I started going to LGBTQIA events, I met these people, and they were all fairly willing to talk about it openly. Their attitude rubbed off on me. Pride, the festival, the films themselves — it all gives you something," Xiao Ming said.

Lao U said the final lineup, and the shortlist for the short-film competition, took a great deal of work. This was the first Queer Film Festival, so there was no precedent to follow, and they ran into one setback after another, both in finding films and in finding sponsors.

Help did come from outside. The Asia-Pacific Queer Film Festival Alliance, made up of queer film festival organizations from across Asia, gave them a lot of advice on programming.

Inside China, by contrast, the people and institutions willing to lend a hand were few.

In July 2017 China issued the General Rules for the Content Review of Online Audio-Visual Programs. Point 6 of Chapter 4, "Standards for Reviewing Programme Content," reads:

Internet audiovisual programme service providers shall, in reviewing the content of online audiovisual programmes, uphold the principles of review before broadcast and review carried out in full. Programmes containing any of the following content or plot elements shall be cut or deleted before broadcast; where the problem is serious, the entire programme shall not be broadcast: belittling, mocking, or damaging the image or reputation of revolutionary leaders or heroic figures; glorifying the armed conquest of foreign lands by China's feudal dynasties; depicting or displaying abnormal sexual relations or sexual acts, such as incest, homosexuality, sexual perversion, sexual assault, sexual abuse and sexual violence.

General Rules for the Content Review of Online Audio-Visual Programs

The rules set off a wide argument online, and even now, if you type "General Rules for the Content Review of Online Audio-Visual Programs" into Baidu, the first suggestion the search box offers is "General Rules for the Content Review of Online Audio-Visual Programs homosexuality."

"At first I thought a queer film festival was the kind of thing that couldn't succeed — whatever you did, you'd get no support... But I felt that if someone wanted to do it, I had no reason to knock them down... Even if it wasn't going to be all that successful, somebody had to do it," Lao U said, recalling how he decided to join the team.

On the night of September 24, the festival held its closing ceremony. The setting had some style to it: 471 Zhapu Road. Built in 1931, the old building is one of the landmarks of Shanghai's Hongkou district; it was once a Buddhist temple, and is now a bar called The Pearl.

It poured rain in Shanghai that day, and the bar was packed anyway. Many people held a beer supplied by a brand sponsor and chatted happily in their seats. Some had come because a friend mentioned it, had nothing else on that day, and figured they could drink and watch a film. Others, like Tris and Xiao Ming, were simply there because they had followed the Queer Film Festival this far.

Ting stood on the stage normally used for song-and-dance shows and thanked the audience. For a while the room felt like a party, then quieted down as the closing film, The Ornithologist, began.

By the organizers' count, the festival drew close to a thousand admissions over its eight days.

(At the request of those interviewed, all names of festival team members and audience members in this article are pseudonyms.)

Cover image: Blue Is the Warmest Colour. All images in the body are courtesy of the Shanghai Queer Film Festival.