Smooth Pink Fresh & Crude is Asian Movie Night’s summer program, made up of a feature film screening of an avant garde classic from late 60s Japan, as well as a selection of short films from varied parts of the world that discuss different aspects of queerness, whether in the abstract or the tangible. Funeral Parade of Roses will be screened in Focus on the 26th of June. Café de Kurk in Arnhem will host a short film program on the 11th of July.

Queer has had a long history of being a word that signals otherness, strangeness, that can carry the tune of disdain, yet also a unifying word that is possessed by its people. But who are those people, and how did we get to come together? In a quest to think about what does a queer way of being feel, sound, or taste like, this summer Asian Movie Night has prepared a diverse and complex program that navitages queer life, embodiment, and desire.

Funeral Parade of Roses

This wonderfully chaotic Japanese queer film gives a good impression of the intensity of the alternative culture in Shinjuku, Tokyo in the 1960s. The new star hostess of Bar Genet is transgender icon Eddie, whose self-confidence and sexuality attract Leda, the whore madam of the bar, and Gonda, the owner. While Eddie gets caught up in this ménage à trois, she hangs out with joint-smoking dropouts, watches experimental films, dances to distorted rock music and sometimes ends up in demonstrations. Matsumoto described the structure and form of the film as like breaking a mirror and then picking up the shards.

Film director and video artist Toshio Matsumoto died in 2017. Not only is his influence on Japanese documentary, experimental film and film criticism still very palpable, his Funeral Parade of Roses is often cited as a major source of inspiration for Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.

Tickets

€12,- (F-pas €10-, Student €8,-)
Cineville card: free

Asian Movie Night

This program is part of Asian Movie Night: a community cultural project in which selected Asian films are being screened to a public on a regular basis with curated themes and after-movie sessions to open up discussions. The project aims to introduce a more diverse view of Asian culture in a comfortable environment and accessible format to a broader audience. It tries to create a physical as well as online community with various cultural backgrounds who are interested in learning about different cultures, hence promoting cross-cultural communication and understanding.