Asian Queers Reunited 2026

Presented by CiLENS e.V. in collaboration with Beijing Queer Film Festival

Launched in 2024, Asian Queers Reunited (AQR) is a Berlin-based cross-disciplinary

initiative connecting audiences with queer narratives from Asia and its diasporas through cinema, conversation, and community encounters.

AQR 2026 explores how queer people create new worlds within and beyond the ones they inherit. Across Asia and its diasporas, queer lives unfold within existing structures; families, nations, traditions, languages, and social norms that often precede individual choice. Rather than simply adapting to these conditions, the films in this year’s program reveal how queer people continually reimagine, negotiate, and transform them.

Through stories of migration, friendship, resistance, intimacy, and community-building, the programme follows different acts of queer world-making. While some protagonists leave in search of new possibilities, others remain and reshape the worlds around them. Together, the films ask not only where queer people belong, but how new forms of life, relation, and collective futures come into being.

Over three days, AQR 2026 brings together film screenings, artist talks, and community gatherings, inviting audiences to explore the many ways queer lives are imagined, lived, and shared across Asia and its diasporas. (CiLENS)

Echo Xuedan TANG is a Berlin-based film curator and cultural producer from Chengdu, China. She is the founder and artistic director of CiLENS e.V. and has initiated projects including Indie Chinese Cinema Week (ICCW), Asian Queers Reunited (AQR), and Re:Frame.

Curatorial support:

Jianing LIU is an Edinburgh-based art writer, curator, and researcher working across writing, photography, and film curation. Her practice explores female self-representation and the relationship between space, image, and embodied perception.

Jane Zhenyi WEI is a film critic, programmer, and distributor based between London and Asia. Her work focuses on East and Southeast Asian cinema, with particular interests in documentary, memory, vernacular cultures, and diasporic narratives.