Young Birds From Strange Mountains

This film program accompanies the exhibition Young Birds from Strange Mountains currently at Schwules Museum in Berlin. The title is borrowed from a poem by the Vietnamese gay-closeted poet Ngô Xuân Diệu (1916-1985), who was a correspondent member at Akademie der Künste in the GDR. The project features young queer arts from Southeast Asia and its diaspora with focus on community archives, spirituality/shamanism, pre-colonial knowledge, and activist movements. This program aims to spark discussion and reclaim knowledge that is often censored and erased by both nationalist and colonial politics.

Ferdiansyah Thajib is a Berlin-based researcher and educator who is a member of KUNCI Study Forum & Collective in Yogyakarta (Indonesia). Currently he is a Senior Lecturer at the Elite Graduate Program “Standards of Decision-making Across Cultures,” University of Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), Germany.

Hai Nam Nguyen is a curator based between Germany and Vietnam. His work focuses on topics such as Vietnamese migration history in Germany, and queerness in Southeast Asian context. He is currently guest curator at the Museum for Asian Art at Humboldt Forum.  

Thao Ho is a researcher and archivist. She is a PhD candidate at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin as part of the research project “Tales of the Diasporic Ordinary” led by Prof. Dr. Elahe Haschemi Yekani. Her research focuses on memory and alternative modes of archiving.

Sarnt Utamachote (ษาณฑ์ อุตมโชติ) is a Southeast Asian nonbinary filmmaker and curator based in Berlin. They curated “In Nobody’s Service” at Galerie Wedding and was a part of the team of “Echoes of the Brother Countries” at HKW Berlin. They also work as a film programmer at Short Film Festival Hamburg and XPOSED Queer Film Festival Berlin.