Lesbian History Double Bill:

《我们在这里》(We Are Here)
Zhao Jing, Shi Tou, China, 2015, 59 min. Chinese with English subtitles, DCP

Home Ground
Aram Kwon, South Korea, 2022, 85 min, Korean with English subtitles, DCP
German Premiere

Curated in partnership with Queer East

In this special double-bill screening, two documentaries about lesbian communities are brought together. We Are Here, a film made by Chinese lesbian activists, interviews the attendees of the United Nations’ “Fourth World Conference on Women” in 1995 in Beijing. Via their candid and often hilarious narration, we witness a brief history of the Chinese lesbian movement that begins with this conference attended by three hundred lesbians. In Home Ground, the owner of the first Lesbian bar in Korea, Myong-woo, reflects on the lesbian scene in Seoul and the changes of the city’s queer spaces. (YCH)

Zhao Jing 赵静 （also “Sam 三木”） has been a pioneering LGBT activist in China since 2005. She is the co-founder and chief editor of les+, the most influential lesbian print magazine in mainland China, with readers across all provinces as well as many other countries. In 2014, she graduated from New York University School of the Arts and directed the documentary We Are Here, which was invited to several international film festivals and screened in more than 10 cities in China. In 2015, she founded Yummy with the aim to provide Chinese people with professional and positive sex education.

Shi Tou 石头 has been an artist and a lesbian activist since the 1990s. She is China’s first lesbian activist celebrity: In 2000 she starred in the country’s first lesbian film, Fish and Elephant, which received the Elvira Notari Prize at Venice Film Festival in 2001 and the Best Asian Film at Forum of New Cinema of the Berlinale in 2022. Her paintings and photographs have been shown in Rotterdam, Chicago, Shanghai, Nanjing and Shenzhen.

KWON A-ram co-directed For the Invisible (2013), a documentary that chronicled the transition of a MTF transgendered person in 2013. In 2018, she directed Queer room and 463 – Poem of the Lost, a documentary about Thailand’s Japanese military comfort women brothels.