This is our first ever Queer East Critics Project – and it has been incredibly generative venturing out together and making up the rules as we go along. We worked with 6 brilliant writers who come from many different fields beyond visual arts and film writing. Writing together has involved dreaming beyond formal constraints of the form of criticism. Within this zine, each writer has produced two texts – a review and a ‘final text’ that bears no limits – venturing into fiction and diaristic entries, to essays on incest and personal reflections of the queer sauna space. All the writing is irreverent, vulnerable, surprising. Throughout the project, we’ve been discussing questions around representation and critique from the beginning, especially when writing about films from specific political, cultural and historical contexts in East and South East Asia – from different filmmakers’ creative modes of evading censorship to historical films which are queer in unexpected ways.

On our first workshop day together, we explored in many ways what it means to ‘represent’ and how our writing could seek to move beyond representation. Ian’s presentation explored the question around the term ‘rediscovery’ and how the term is loaded with varying power dynamics – who is doing this ‘rediscovering’ of a specific film history and for whom are they ‘rediscovering’ these films for? How do these terms shape critical writing and further exoticise national cinemas? Cici’s presentation focused on the sensorial experience of cinema beyond sight as our primary form of contact – from thinking of the historical violence of visuality and representation from the Enlightenment to now, to exploring the unconscious embodied experience offered by sleeping in the cinema. Phuong’s presentation further sought to negate the binaries we often fall into in film criticism (local vs global, arthouse vs popular, East vs West) for a re-evaluation of the canon of film criticism – citing writers including Edogawa Rampo, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki and Mani Kaul. For as long as cinema has existed, there have been non-male, non-white perspectives on film from across the globe.

While writing can be a hermitic process, this does not mean that critics must always face the tyranny of the blank page in solitude. In addition to providing participants with necessary critical and professional tools, what our workshop seeks to emphasise most is a sense of togetherness and camaraderie in a field still fragmented by hierarchy and precarity. Our outing to a screening of Choi Eun-hee’s A Princess’ One-Sided Love (1967), one of the many repertory titles shown at this year’s Queer East, was followed by an equally delightful Korean dinner where conversations, as well as makgeolli, flowed. Our mentoring sessions also aimed to foster this communal spirit. Apart from discussions of outlines and opening paragraphs, what we hope to achieve is an economy of care and mentorship that will last beyond the scope of the workshop.

As editors and mentors, but also as critics ourselves, we are conscious of the difficult and precarious situation young critics find themselves in. Opportunities are scarce, paid opportunities even scarcer; critics are increasingly pressured to eschew rigour, sincerity or adventurousness in favour of producing PR-friendly boilerplate. We wanted our Critics Project to offer a space outside of this prescriptiveness, to share the same experimentation and fluidity that has driven Queer East’s programming.

We hope this is clearest in our critics’ final projects, each of which has taken on a different form and posed a different question. Cinema is a site of many things in these pieces: of memory, of joy, of embodied experience. But it is not neutral, or simply a tool for empathy or education. Cinema confronts us – particularly cinema which transgresses societal or filmmaking conventions – by making a political provocation, by destabilising our senses and desires, and in the conversations and arguments that continue even after the screen has faded to black. In pushing the boundaries of what film writing can and should look like, our critics have confronted us too.

Phuong Le, Cici Peng and Ian Wang