Just three years ago the Queer East Festival: On The Road was touring to five different venues. This year it is touring to 15, taking in Brighton from October 29-November 2.
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00:00Good afternoon, my name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor at Sussex Newspapers.
00:06Lovely this afternoon to speak to Yi Wang, who is bringing to Brighton the Queer East
00:12Festival. Now you've had incredible success, you started with pretty bad timing during the pandemic
00:17but you rode that and in the last three years the festival has become three times the size,
00:23which is phenomenal achievement isn't it? Why is the Queer East Festival doing so well and do you
00:28think? I think one of the reasons is definitely that we have a really unique position in the film
00:39and arts and cultural sector that the festival is focused on East and Southeast Asian queer cinema,
00:45live arts and movie image works that a lot of people don't really have the chance to see before,
00:52which definitely sparks a great interest among the audience who want to experience,
01:00who want to get to know more about East and Southeast Asian queer. So you've really tapped
01:04into the desire haven't you, as you said it was underrepresented. Yes, yes and then we are also
01:11surprisingly to actually get a lot of interest from the younger audiences in this country that I
01:17feel they definitely are really interested in knowing more about East and Southeast Asian cultures
01:25and also I think one of the very sort of unique reason for the festival can be so
01:37like, one of, sorry can I? Yeah, please, yeah. Sorry, so I think also I think one of
01:44another reason that the festival can be so attractive is because all these contents we
01:50are showing they probably are not available on any streaming platform, so the only way that
01:57you can see this is coming to the cinema and watching with us. Fantastic and you started,
02:03you do two weeks in London, you initially did five cities, you're now doing 15 cities, can you just
02:09keep on expanding like that? What's the plan? Yeah, we are trying, right, because I think
02:15we definitely get a lot of interest from other cities as well, so we will definitely see what we
02:21can do to bring this really thin queer cinema to a wider audience across the country and
02:29this is actually our first time to go to, to be working with Comedia in Brighton,
02:36so it's really exciting for us. Fantastic, well good luck with that, congratulations on
02:42what you've achieved so far and lovely to speak to you, thank you. Thank you so much.