This 2-hour online event brings together international filmmakers, curators and activists to explore alternative and decolonised ways of imagining and mapping the queer world in a non-Eurocentric way. Using images, film and sound, this interactive screening and panel discussion with Q&A will bridge the gap between LGBTQ+ social activism, decolonial knowledge, and cinematic imagination by inviting the audience to challenge heteronormative historical narratives of anti-colonial struggles. The event explores how we can imagine alternative approaches in which queer bodies across Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean participate in and reclaim discourses for themselves, their communities, and their liberation, as neither national, nor sexual, objects.
What’s the event about?:
"But what harm is in diversity, when there is unity in desire?" With this question, the Indonesian president Sukarno opened the 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung, a ground-breaking political event that for the first time brought together newly independent states from both Africa and Asia. Whilst being known as one of the earliest global alliances of people of colour in politics not aligned with European and western power blocks, the conference represented only the interests of nation-states, at the cost of marginalising queer and indigenous groups. Our Festival of Social Science event reflects on the international and decolonising ambition of the original summit by sharing with the public the work of 'Imagining Queer Bandung', a creative collective and workshop series on decolonial queer filmmaking and podcasting.
About the chair and the panellists
Dr Hongwei Bao is Associate Professor in Media Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK, where he also directs the Centre for Contemporary East Asian Cultural Studies. He is the author of Queer Comrades, Queer China and Queer Media in China. He serves on the editorial boards of British Journal of Chinese Studies and Chinese Independent Cinema Observer. He also writes and edits a column titled Queer Lens for the Chinese Independent Film Archive.
Popo Fan is a Berlin-based Chinese diaspora filmmaker, curator and writer. His films include queer activism documentaries and scripted, sex-positive shorts. For more than a decade, he has organised the Beijing Queer Film Festival and founded the Queer University Video Training Camp in China. In 2019 he curated film series More Than A Midnight Rainbow about Chinese-made and Chinese-speaking queer films at bi’bak.
Ragil Huda is a graduate student at the Asien-Afrika Institut, Universität Hamburg. He co-founded QTIBIPoC Hamburg (Queer, Trans*, Intersex, Black, Indigenous, and Persons of Colour) and is part of an international network called 'Queer' Asia in Berlin collective. His community engagement specifically centres on queerness, intersectionality, community building, anti-racism, and the social-political realities of marginalised people through various methodologies and creative activism.
Kit Hung is an independent filmmaker from Hong Kong. His films have won several international awards. He is most notable for his film Soundless Wind Chime (2009), which has won several awards, and was distributed in Germany, Hong Kong, North America, France and the United Kingdom. He is a lecturer in the Academy of Film, Hong Kong Baptist University since 2012.
Sarnt Utamachote is a filmmaker, photographer and curator. He is a co-founder of un.thai.tled, a collective of Thai-diasporic creatives in Germany, through which he curated un.thai.tled Film Festival Berlin as well as Beyond the Kitchen: Stories of Thai Park, for example. His video installation I Am Not Your Mother (2020) was officially exhibited at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and his short film Soy Sauce (2020) was premiered at OutFest Fusion Queer Film Festival Los Angeles.