Shorts Program I: Homes We Make, Homes We Leave

In collaboration with Beijing Queer Film Festival

回乡偶记 (My Dear Dear Home)
Yue RAN, Switzerland, China 2026, 20 min, Chinese with Chinese and English subtitles, Berlin Premiere 

Aliens in Beirut
Raghed Charabaty, Canada, Lebanon 2025, 17 min, English, Arabic with English subtitles

Listen to Your Love for Me
Kai XU, France 2025, 23 min, French with English subtitles

A is for Andra
Charmaine Poh, Indonesia 2025, 16 min, Indonesian, English with English subtitles

Followed by a talk with Yue RAN, Kai XU and Dirandra Sandyakala.

Home is rarely a fixed place. For many queer people, it exists between memory and movement, inheritance and reinvention. Across departures, returns, and detours, the films in this programme trace the many ways queer lives make home. In My Dear Dear Home, a return from a newly married life in Switzerland to mother(land) opens a heartfelt reconnection between mother and daughter. Aliens in Beirut finds queer intimacy amid political instability and displacement. Through humour and performance, A is for Andra traces self-reinvention of a non-binary transmasculine adult from Indonesia to Berlin. Yet new homes remain complex: Listen to Your Love for Me follows a Chinese immigrant navigating his intimate relationship and political frustration in Paris. (CiLENS)

Yue RAN is a director and editor based between Paris and Zurich, with extensive experience in screenwriting for female-centred stories across cultural contexts in China, Japan, France, and Italy.

Kai XU is a Paris-based filmmaker from Badong, China, whose interdisciplinary practice spans film, writing, sound design, and podcasting, exploring erotic sensations, everyday life, and non-human mysticism to imagine queer utopias.

Dirandra Sandyakala (all pronouns/dia) is an Indonesian multidisciplinary artist, media producer, and educator based in Berlin whose practice moves fluidly between performance, experimental documentary, audio, text and movement, exploring self-reclaimed narratives of diasporic and fluid embodiment through lightness, playfulness and rawness.

If the weather is bad, the screening will take place indoors.