Spring Fever (2010)

Romance, longing, heartbreak and joy — the most beautiful love stories featuring LGBTQ+ couples. From period pieces to contemporary romances, these films prove that love has always existed in every form. Essential queer cinema for the heart.

From Wong Kar-wai's Buenos Aires to Park Chan-wook's colonial Korea, queer desire in Asian cinema often arrives oblique, repressed, devastating, gorgeous. Farewell My Concubine's doomed love across decades of upheaval. Happy Together's toxic tango 18,000 km from home. The Handmaiden's electric, layered con game. Tropical Malady's mythic dissolution into the jungle. This flock is the canon — and a very good argument that Asian cinema does queer storytelling better than almost anyone.

The Sixth Generation (第六代) emerged in the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown — filmmakers who worked outside the state studio system on 16mm film and digital video, with non-professional actors and no official backing. Where the Fifth Generation used allegory and visual splendour to speak about history, the Sixth Generation turned to the streets of contemporary China: migrant workers, factory hands, provincial pickpockets, displaced youth, the people left behind or ground up by the country's headlong modernisation. Shot with documentary texture — long takes, handheld cameras, ambient sound — their films have a rawness and intimacy that state-sanctioned cinema could not produce. Key figures: Jia Zhangke (贾樟柯, born 1970) — the movement's most internationally celebrated voice, whose Still Life won the Golden Lion at Venice (2006) and who received Cannes' Carrosse d'Or in 2015; films span Pickpocket through Platform, Unknown Pleasures, The World, A Touch of Sin, Mountains May Depart, Ash Is Purest White and Caught by the Tides. Lou Ye (娄烨, born 1965) — twice banned from filmmaking for five years for showing unauthorised work abroad; Suzhou River, Summer Palace, Spring Fever, Blind Massage and Saturday Fiction are all essential. Wang Xiaoshuai (王小帅, born 1966) — Beijing Bicycle, Shanghai Dreams, So Long My Son. Wang Bing (王兵, born 1967) — China's great documentary filmmaker, whose Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (9 hours) is a landmark of world cinema; also Dead Souls (8 hours), 'Til Madness Do Us Part, Mrs. Fang, and the ongoing Youth trilogy.