Queer East on the Road at Showroom Cinema

Showroom Cinema prides itself on championing underrepresented voices. This November, Queer East’s touring film programme returns to Showroom for its sixth year, bringing five stories of queer Asian lives from six countries and regions to the big screen. Across four weeks, audiences can travel from Macau and Taiwan to Thailand, South Korea, Cambodia and Singapore, each film telling its own distinct story. Founded in 2020, Queer East set out to elevate queer and Asian voices in the UK, in response to a systemic lack of Asian representation in the arts. The festival challenges the conventions and stereotypes associated with portrayals of queer Asian people.

From a line-up of over 100 premieres, documentaries, short films and restorations, Showroom has selected four features and a programme of shorts: a mix of drama, comedy and documentary, including two feature debuts.

Tracy Choi’s Girlfriends opens the season on Tuesday 3 November. Spanning three stages of one woman’s life, this intelligent, female-centred coming-of-age drama follows a filmmaker in her mid-thirties, juggling romance and work pressures, as she looks back on growing up in Macau and studying in Taiwan.

A week later, on Tuesday 10 November, comes A Useful Ghost, a stylish dark comedy set in a world where ghosts return to inhabit household appliances in search of revenge, meaning and love. Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s feature debut is both a satire on industrial pollution and a wildly camp attack on the Thai establishment.

On Tuesday 17 November, the documentary Between Goodbyes travels to the South Korean capital, Seoul, with Mieke and her wife, who are celebrating their wedding with Mieke’s birth mother. Mieke was adopted as a child and raised in the Netherlands, and through her story this tender film considers the wider effects of mass overseas adoption.

The final feature, 3670, screens on Tuesday 24 November and stays in Seoul. Park Joon-ho’s feature debut follows a North Korean defector trying to find his place in South Korea’s gay scene, exploring what it means to be an outsider twice over.

The season ends on Thursday 26 November with Twilight in Your Eyes, five short films paying tribute to queer elders, a group too rarely represented on screen. Curated by Xi Liu through the Up Next: Future Film Curators Lab 2025/26, the programme travels from a hometown village after the Cambodian civil war to a drag club in Singapore, bringing the season to a life-affirming close.

Book your tickets at https://showroomcinema.org.uk/festivals/queer-east-on-the-road-2026

By Grace Osbourne, Marketing Manager