BUTTERFLY KISS Yan Yan Mak's tale of lesbian love heats up Comrades: The Chinese LGBT Film Festival.

Just when memories of Beijing are beginning to fade after last week’s close of the Summer Olympics, nonprofit organization Asia Catalyst plans to revive them in a big, queer way with Comrades: The Chinese LGBT Film Festival, which runs this weekend at the Center. The showcase will feature four films about gay life in China, all originally part of a program banned repeatedly in Beijing between 2001 and 2004 by Chinese authorities when determined organizers, using underground text-message publicity, tried to hold the event in spaces from a Beijing University library to a cramped gay bar. Although homosexuality was officially decriminalized in China in 1997, public expressions of freedom are discouraged—especially, it turns out, when they are queer. Chinese law requires that any gathering of 50 or more people needs government permission, so it’s no wonder the film fest had so much trouble getting off the ground.

But now it will go forward, at least in part, right here. “The works themselves are important and deserve to be seen; they are interesting, edgy and beautifully filmed,” says Meg Davis, executive director of Asia Catalyst, a New York group started in November 2006 with the aim of helping community organizers in Asia jump-start special projects, mainly AIDS-focused thus far. Comrades came about when one of the group’s volunteers with ties to China suggested bringing the banned festival here. “They were incredibly excited to have the work shown in the U.S., and shipped the films immediately,” says Davis, referring to the people behind the Beijing fest.

One of those brave ringleaders was Yang Yang, a student and part-time coordinator of Chinese cultural events now based in Brussels. “Because of the cinema censorship in China, these films cannot be shown in public cinemas, so [a festival] is the only place for the Chinese public to see these works, unless they’re distributed on pirated DVDs,” he explained via e-mail. “Beijing is the center of China, and it should have been a pioneer of all kinds of art and culture. Nearly all of the best Chinese filmmakers and intellectual elite gather in Beijing, but we don’t even have a real independent film festival that can showcase LGBTQ issues.” Yang Yang adds that he continues to wrestle with the question of how queer Chinese filmmakers can get their work seen by larger audiences, and that having it screened in various cities abroad feels like a somewhat satisfying solution.

“These films need to be seen, as Chinese queer people’s lives and other marginalized people’s lives need to be known by the rest of the world,” he adds. “So when Asia Catalyst contacted us and proposed this project, we were all very excited.”

The schedule this weekend consists of East Palace, West Palace, which explores the experiences of a gay man who is arrested and interrogated for cruising; Tangtang, about a glamorous drag queen who attracts the passions of a lesbian couple; Welcome to Destination Shanghai, a collection of vignettes about male sex workers, aging actresses and other societal fringes; and Butterfly, about a married schoolteacher who questions her sexual identity after a chance encounter with a seductive songstress.

Yan Yan Mak, the Hong Kong–based director of Butterfly, said it was difficult to find funding for her film, made in 2004 and based on a Taiwanese novel, The Mark of the Butterfly, written by Chen Xue. “After my film was released [in various festivals], I got so much feedback from the audience, and I felt so glad that I made this work,” she said via e-mail. “I would say that Butterfly is not just a lesbian story, but one about the experience of my generation in 1980s Hong Kong. It’s about people, about love, about being honest to one’s self.”

Because of the universality of this as well as the other films in Comrades, Davis has high hopes that the festival will appeal to a wide swath of the public. “We hope New York’s queer community, as well as fans of foreign film, will come,” she says. “These are voices that deserve to be heard.”

Comrades: The Chinese LGBT Film Festival is Fri 5–Sun 7 at the Center.