The Living Archive —— Queer Cinema in Chinese Contexts
In the absence of official recordsand amid the deletion or banning of queer images-queer cinema in Chinese contexts hive reappearance. Seldom admitted into searchable canons, it lives in a rhythm of presencebeing'disappeared'-sudden survives at the edges through community-run, mobile exts guerrilla screenings, informal circulation, and word of mouth. What is missing is not a title or two,but an affective and social history repeatedly fractured-an institutionally unwritten,yet undeniably real history of queer cinema in Chinese contexts. For twenty-five years,the Beijing Queer Film Festival has kept this memory alive, bearing witness through guerrilla screenings and community networks. Archiving,therefore, is not storage but the work of keeping images visible,remembered,and researchable.
In naming this project,we refused both a static,practice-detached 'database' and a'museum' that would fix the task of legitimizing queer cinema;hence the Living Archive.For us, archiving is a practice in motionnot an endpoint.Process is content: a screening,a conversation,a correction to the record-each becomes an archival event. Our collaborative archiving practices operate within a decentralized, community-led stewardship model-multi-party care and collective decision-making, rather than a one-way 'donation-reception' pipeline.Our strength lies not in volume but in resilience and sustainability. Amid political and technical volatility, we maintain visibility and usability through multi-site preservation, tiered access, and inter-city collaboration.
Our approach is action-based:preservecollect,catalog,and digitize films and documents;reenactthrough oral histories, workshops,and curatorial practice,bring silenced voices into new contexts;reactivatereturn the archive to the public through creative uses.Technically,we cooperate in parallel with institutional archives: aligning descriptive standards,sharing interfaces,and building transregional systems for synchronized preservation and calibrated accessbalancing openness with protection.
We do not seek an authoritative narrative;so long as screenings continue,the archive keeps updating to screen is to archive.
Jenny Man Wu
Founder of The Living Archive
livingarchive@bjqff.com
The Team
Jenny Man Wu
Founder of Living Archiveslivingarchive@bjqff.com
Curator, film producer, theater creator, and researcher, she has long been engaged in Chinese queer cinema, independent filmmaking, and archival practices. She has participated in the organization and curation of the Beijing Queer Film Festival for an extended period and continues to develop cross-regional screenings, forums, and community cultural projects. A recipient of the Chevening Scholarship, she recently initiated "The Living Archive of Queer Films in Chinese Context," aiming to preserve, organize, and reinvigorate Chinese queer films and memories at risk of disappearing due to censorship, dispersal, and historical ruptures.
Cui Zi’en
Living Archive ConsultantHolding cross-disciplinary identities: writer, independent filmmaker, cultural scholar, curator, and advocate and practitioner of LGBTQ rights and independent cinema. One of the founders of the Beijing Queer Film Festival.
Early visual works include "Old Testament," "The Clown Appears," "Ahya, Go Breastfeeding," "Youth Flora and Fauna Yellow," "My Son as Beautiful as a Flower," and "Zhi LGBTQ." Recent novels include "Public Toilet Cinema Open All Year" (Day Shift Volume, Night Shift Volume) and "Some Praise Intelligence, Some Do Not." His works have been awarded multiple international prizes.
With a distinct queer perspective, he explores issues of gender and identity, continuously challenging mainstream narrative structures and social norms, laying the foundation for and consistently promoting the formation and development of Chinese-language queer culture. His actions and works have far-reaching influence.
Kexin Wo
Member of the Executive Committee of the Beijing Queer Film Festival, Secretary of the Aiku Film Week (2025). He/She/They graduated with a master's degree from the China National Center for Film Art Research (China Film Archive), with a research focus on curation and film festivals. Currently engaged in work related to film festival exhibitions and film and television databases, with an interest in gender and queer issues.
Hu Qihong
Chair of the Organizing Committee and rotating president of the Beijing Queer Film Festival (2024, 2025). Born in 1996, graduated in 2021 from the China Film Art Research Center and China Film Archive, with a research focus on Chinese socialist film culture from 1949 to 1966. Previously worked at the China (Guangzhou) International Documentary Film Festival, Hainan Island International Film Festival, and Pingyao International Film Festival as an international content producer and festival coordinator, currently serving as the technical manager of the cinema and performance space at the French Cultural Center in Beijing.