Wednesday, June 26 at 8 PM

Doors 7:30 pm; $5 admission

Dirty Looks and Echo Park Film Center and Queer Forever! invite you to “Queer Lust,” curated by Nguyễn Quốc Thành, a raunchy shorts program by Vietnamese and Vietnamese American filmmakers that takes queer sex quite seriously.

In the past few years, two LGBT documentaries took Vietnamese multiplexes by storm, a sign that audiences are open to watching films about LGBT life and its struggles. But what about the films that are defiantly queer: experimental, bizarre, silly or kinky? Who will watch that sort of cinema? The gays and lesbians? The sex addicts or the cinephiles? Ironically, when Queer Lust was first screened in Hanoi, the house was packed with young queers but the LGBT activists were absent.

These six films explore queer sexual pleasure and celebrate sex magick: Vietnamese-Americans Vu T. Thu Ha and Nguyen Tan Hoang clearly have fun turning the camera on themselves or their milieu, while simultaneously taking aim at race and sex wars. In the case of the Vietnamese filmmakers, dealing with the taboo of queer sex seems to spark experimentation: Truong Minh Quy’s “The Sublime of Rectum” is composed of one, long hard take, while Chu Tran Minh Duc’s “The Lover” is based on still images. Viet Vu’s “The Ant-man” explores longing and what lies behind physiological needs.

Nguyễn Quốc Thành is a co-founding member of Nha San Collective and has been organizing the Queer Forever! arts festival in Hanoi since 2013.

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