The Queer East festival returns to London in 2026, staging a five-week season that maps shifting queer experience across East and Southeast Asia. Running from 1 May to 6 June, the programme gathers feature films, documentaries, short-form work and moving-image pieces across multiple venues. Festival organisers have emphasised the importance of cinematic memory, pairing contemporary premieres with restored classics and rare prints to spark conversations between past and present.
Screenings and events take place at established centres including the Barbican and BFI Southbank, alongside independent cinemas and community spaces. The line-up intentionally foregrounds both high-profile festival winners and quiet, local stories: awards-season films rubbing shoulders with archival discoveries and experimental shorts. Throughout the schedule, strands such as BodyHacking and curated retrospectives offer thematic pathways into the programme and provide context for emerging filmmakers and historical voices.
Highlights and major premieres
The festival opens at the Barbican with a newly completed 4K restoration of The Outsiders, the seminal Taiwanese adaptation of Pai Hsien-Yung’s novel. That restored print forms a centrepiece alongside recent prizewinners such as Cactus Pears, which won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and explores gentle queer romance in rural western India. Also presenting their UK premieres are films like A Good Child, a drag-inflected comedy-drama from Singapore, and the documentary Between Goodbyes, which examines queer adoption and the legacy of Korea’s overseas adoption programmes.
Opening night and archival revivals
Opening with The Outsiders signals the festival’s archival ambition: restored material is used to recover censored or lost moments from queer film history. Alongside the 4K presentation, Queer East schedules two rare screenings from 35mm prints, offering audiences the different textures of film projection and an encounter with cinema’s material past. These restorations are framed to invite debate about heritage and continuity: how earlier depictions of desire and belonging inform today’s storytelling and community memory.
New voices and diverse storytelling
Beyond restorations, the programme highlights contemporary work that interrogates identity in varied social landscapes. Films such as the South Korean milestone 3670 and Joan Chen’s Montreal, My Beautiful bring diasporic and national narratives into dialogue with queer experience. Other selections—like Tracy Choi’s romantic drama and Nigel Santos’ ensemble piece Open Endings—examine chosen families, intimacy and the politics of care. These premieres showcase filmmakers who balance personal nuance with broader cultural critique, expanding the festival’s emotional range.
Shorts, strands and experimental programmes
Short films and curated strands give room to bolder, more experimental forms. The BodyHacking strand gathers five shorts that interrogate the body, hormones and reproductive ethics, mixing animation, documentary and experimental modes. The retrospective Pixelated Lesbian Mixtape excavates nine archival pieces by Azian Nurudin, offering an opportunity to witness a nearly forgotten voice in queer Asian cinema. Standalone shorts like Molly portray underrepresented orientations, with asexuality rendered sensitively in intimate, laundromat-set drama.
Special events and conversations
Several screenings include live introductions and post-screening discussions that deepen understanding of cultural context. For example, Ulrike Ottinger’s Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia will be introduced by a curator and followed by a conversation with London-based Buryat artist Margarita Galandina about Indigenous Mongolian rituals depicted in the film. These events frame the films as living texts, encouraging audiences to hear from artists, archivists and community historians who bridge cinematic form and lived histories.
How to see the programme
Tickets and full scheduling information are available through the festival’s website and venue box offices; many screenings sell out, especially restored and 35mm presentations. Queer East’s mix of high-profile premieres, archival restorations and thematic strands makes it a rich proposition for cinephiles and community audiences alike. Whether you attend the opening night at the Barbican or discover an overlooked gem in a smaller venue, the festival invites sustained attention to the past and present of East Asian queer cinema.