Art House 101: Global Queer Cinema

For the next film in our Art House 101: Global Queer Cinema series, we’re looking through the eyes of a filmmaker who brought her own cultural experience to a story about family, identity, and falling in love: Alice Wu’s Saving Face. Wil is a successful young surgeon living in New York’s tight-knit Chinese-American community, where her single life is already a source of concern for her traditional mother. But when her mother unexpectedly becomes pregnant and is sent to live with Wil, the pressure to maintain the family’s reputation only intensifies. Then Wil meets Vivian, a beautiful and openly queer ballet dancer, and finds herself falling in love, forcing her to choose between the expectations placed upon her and the life she actually wants. Drawing from her own experiences as a queer Chinese-American woman, Alice Wu’s Saving Face is a deeply personal romantic comedy about the complicated ways sexuality shape who we allow ourselves to become. With its charming performances and refusal to choose between cultural tradition and queer identity, Wu created a film that understands that sometimes the hardest person to come out to is yourself.

As we turn the corner towards the end of our Art House 101: Global Queer Cinema series, we’re celebrating one of the essential voices of contemporary queer cinema with a double feature from French filmmaker Céline Sciamma: Water Lilies + Tomboy. Sciamma’s debut feature, Water Lilies, plunges into the charged world of teenage desire, where a sexual awakening can feel impossibly intense. When Marie befriends Floriane, the star of a local synchronized swimming team, she becomes fascinated by her new friend, even as Floriane’s complicated relationship with her own sexuality begins to blur the boundaries between admiration and desire. Then, in Tomboy, Sciamma turns her gaze toward gender identity through the eyes of a ten-year-old child. After moving to a new neighborhood, Laure introduces herself to the other children as “Michaël,” beginning to navigate friendships, play, and first love while keeping her secret from her family. What begins as a simple childhood game gradually becomes a tender exploration of discovering who you might be. Long before Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Sciamma was already making some of the most quietly radical films about queer desire and identity. This double feature is an exemplary early showcase of her extraordinary talent. There will be a 10 minute intermission between the movies. One ticket gets you access to both films.

The penultimate film in our Art House 101: Global Queer Cinema series is Joyland, Saim Sadiq’s tender, quietly radical portrait of family and the complicated ways we perform the roles society gives us. Haider lives with his wife and extended family in Lahore, where everyone seems to have a carefully prescribed role, especially the men. When Haider secretly takes a job as a backup dancer for an erotic theater troupe, he meets Biba, a magnetic transgender performer, and the two begin a relationship that forces Haider to confront desires he has spent his life suppressing. Meanwhile, the women in his family are struggling under their own impossible expectations, creating a portrait of a household where everyone is searching for some kind of freedom. With Joyland, Sadiq brings an extraordinary tenderness to a story about a family in contemporary Pakistan. Sensual without being sensationalistic and heartbreaking without ever losing its warmth, the film became the first Pakistani film selected for the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Queer Palm. At its heart, Joyland is about what happens when the life you’re expected to want collides with the life you secretly desire. We think it's one of the best films of the 2020s, and a perfect fit for this series!

What better way to end our Art House 101: Global Queer Cinema series than by celebrating the magic of the movie theater with Tsai Ming-Liang’s haunting, hypnotic Goodbye, Dragon Inn. On the final night before an old Taipei movie palace closes its doors, a handful of patrons gather to watch King Hu’s classic martial arts film Dragon Inn. On screen, swordsmen battle in a long-gone world of cinematic fantasy. In the theater, ghosts seem to linger in the shadows, a projectionist works almost entirely unseen, and a mysterious young man wanders through the empty corridors searching for connection. Among the sparse audience are two aging actors who once appeared together in Dragon Inn, watching themselves, and the cinema they once knew, disappear. With almost no dialogue and an extraordinary sensitivity to the act of watching, Tsai Ming-liang transforms a nearly empty movie theater into a place of queer longing. The furtive glances, anonymous encounters, and solitary figures drifting through the darkness evoke the secretive spaces where desire has so often found refuge. Goodbye, Dragon Inn is a film about so many things: a ghost story, a love letter to cinema, and a profoundly melancholic meditation on loneliness. Goodbye, Art House 101: Global Queer Cinema!