By Harry Bayley

Cici Peng’s “I Will Haunt You Forever: Queer Ghosts Across Time” programme reconsiders what it is to haunt. A disembodied voice, whispers in the forest, bodies moulding together and a revenant flying high above the river.

Composed of 5 moving-image works, the programme features Ghost Carnival 鬼的狂歡 (1994) directed by Qiu Miaojin and co-written by Lin Hsu Wen-Er, Whispering Ghosts (2008) directed by Taiki Sakpisit, In Our Being (2011) directed by Ghislan Sutherland-Timm and Jann Earl Q. Madariaga, All Trace is Gone No Clamour for a Kiss (2022) directed by Chirs Zhongtian Yuan and River is My Hometown (2021) directed by River Cao.

Ghosts are used in different ways here, ghosts of unfulfilled desire, ghosts of the land, ghosts of ourselves, ghosts of the past and ghosts revisiting home forever changed.

In Ghost Carnival, the only film ever made by seminal Taiwanese lesbian writer Qiu Miaojin, the ghost of a young woman comes back to haunt her adopted brother in the days leading up to his 20th birthday. The film is non-linear; we bounce between scenes of the two siblings Si Ping and Jin Yang together and then Jinyang alone at home and on a beach. A cassette player is a constant presence in these scenes, broadcasting thoughts of a love no longer, grief and desire not fulfilled. We learn of Jin Yang’s deep adoration of his sister Si Ping and desire to marry her, in one scene confessing this, he embraces her. In between shots of waves crashing onto the beach and Jin Yang’s home we learn Si Ping, unable to cope with this taboo relationship, commits suicide. Jin Yang cannot let go, he sits on the beach lingering in the memory of Si Ping. Jin Yang plays back Si Ping’s laughter, a disembodied sound from a past life, the cassette tape an extradiegetic trace of the past.

Through engaging with the siblings’ taboo relationship Qiu unexpectedly explores something perhaps more autobiographical. Si Ping’s words, “I love you, but we cannot be together” hints beyond the taboo of their relationship but to the impossibility of other kinds of desire. Qiu died by suicide at the age of 26 a year after the film’s completion. The disembodied voice from the cassette players feels as though it is Qiu, an otherworldly presence reciting lines on love, desire and loss. Eventually, Jin Yang travels to the coast one final time, the tape is thrown into the sea, and the director casts their feelings to the ocean to be washed away and absolved of sin.

Thai director Taiki Sakpisit’s Whispering Ghosts uses spirits to tell stories of the land. Taiki takes us through a dying man’s consciousness during their transition to the next life. A veiled woman enters the scene, our rebirth being paused, she talks of confiding treasure in witches, poverty and hate. The next spirit we only hear is shown alongside imagery of landscape being drilled into. Unlike Ghost Carnival, the disembodied voice is used to tell a collective history, like an ominous prophet. These whisperers muffle the sounds of the city, echoing into the distance out to whoever listens.

In Our Being is a Canadian-Filipino co-production from Ghislan Sutherland-Timm & Jann Earl Q. Madariaga, made on Super 8 combines collage and stop-motion. Having been through a journey of rebirth in Whispering Ghosts, In Our Being keeps us in this “other” space. The film explores the experience of two queer people of colour by attempting to fit these two perspectives into one body via cut-and-paste. An alien body is made through a collage of segmented parts, in dual projection we watch hands, mouths, and arms blending into the air, once side by side these images flirt with one another, cruising in the dark eventually they converge to touching where they cannot across both time and space.

All Trace is Gone No Clamour for a Kiss exists in the space in between, we see two beings talk of displacement, grief, queer intimacy and the multiple histories embodied within them. Exploring histories of colonial exploitation, its title is taken from Toni Morrisons’ 1987 novel Beloved where historical trauma becomes a ghost. In comparison to In Our Being where historical boundaries are overcome, All Trace is Gone grapples with history and its connection to bodies in the present. A combination of computer-generated railways, colonial-era ships and an expansive real-image forest dominates the space re-map architectures of colonialism – from the railways referencing the labour of Chinese immigrants in North America to the colonial ships of the slave trade are contrasted against this dreamy forest, a place of rebirth and reclamation. History is both revealed within colossal structures and at a more embodied level: one of these souls talks of their mother being inside them: “She sighs inside my body, she panics inside my body”. History is a lineage of memories, some that cannot be decoded.

We end with River is My Hometown, where River Cao employs the ritualistic to explore grief and loss about their childhood home as a queer person now alienated by their community. A revenant who is brought forward through a veiled mother figure considers family, rebirth and otherness. Through voiceover, we understand they are returning to a home near the water. In contrast to the unseen but yearned-for mother in All Trace is Gone, this one talks back. This mother looks at the future rather than the past much like the veiled woman in Whispering Ghosts this is a mother of the land, a reincarnated mother. An imagined version of their mother perhaps, one which is queer. We watch as the revenant floats high above their hometown, unable to interact, merely observing. River is My Hometown, uses a ghostly revenant to explore the feeling of returning home, changed and unknowable to those who raised you and wishes for a better future.

In “I Will Haunt You Forever”, ghosts are used as a way of experiencing, processing and understanding the multifaceted histories of queer and Asian people. From Qiu Miaojin’s use of a disembodied voice explore her identity to River Cao now a revenant floating above their hometown, ghosts are used as a way of communicating a feeling, a yearning for something to change, the histories that made you and way of resisting what oppresses you.