Aug 20th (Thu) 12:45～ @JMS ASTER PLAZA Medium Hall
This iteration of the Queer Animation Screening brings together a selection of works that seek to articulate the "queer" through movements of transformation, repetition, and deviation, while building upon accumulated queer representation and lived experiences.
Animation can be understood as a medium where the body is continuously redrawn from one severed frame to the next.
Its very principle challenges the illusion of the "correct body. What emerges is not a fixed form, but an ongoing process of becoming.
Normative bodies, normative desires, and normative time—the medium of animation possesses the latent potential to destabilize these constructs and open up a queer perception. Through this program, we wish to propose and explore that very possibility.
A talk by curator Honami Yano is scheduled after the screening.
Gest: Honami Yano
“Hide and Seek” is a 3D animation that takes viewers on a bittersweet journey. It presents a story of person hiding their queer identity from their parents at different stages of life. The film highlights the struggles faced by the queer community as they grow up and explores the fantasy of queer spaces with queer phenomenology.
Junjie (Dinggo) Xu is a animation director and visual designer from China, based in Shanghai and London. Dinggo’s artistic practice focuses on employing surreal imagery and 3D spatial techniques to elucidate the essence of contemporary human societal activities and the culture of the queer community.
In the early 18th century, in the blue mountains of Jamaica, enslaved Africans who had escaped from plantations founded autonomous communities of Maroons.
Queen Nanny, their supreme leader, led their struggle for freedom.
She is one of the most celebrated figures from Jamaica, and embodies the victorious fight against slavery and colonialism, as well as the resistance of the island’s women.
Her spirit remains very much alive.
The Windward Maroons, from the community of Moore Town, celebrate their Queen every year in dance ceremonies.
Simone Harris, one of her descendants, revisits the history of this legendary figure.
Christine Rebet (b. 1971 Lyon France, lives and works in Paris and New York) received her MFA from Columbia University and her BA (Hons) from Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design, London. Her work is based on drawing and develops into forms ranging from animation to the environment, installations and performance art. At the heart of her work is the elaboration of historical traumas in the context of a personal interpretation and a consequent reanimation.
Amersfoort, Netherlands; Parasol Unit, London; The sculpture Center, Long Island; Grieder Contemporary, Zurich; AlbumArte, Rome; Unge Kunstneres Samfund, Oslo; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Singapore; Le Magasin, Grenoble; Shanghai Art Museum; Parasol Unit, London; Kamel Mennour Gallery, Paris, Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo to name a few.
Rebet’s work appears in the public collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France , the Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne, Vitry-sur- Seine, France, Kadist Fondation, Paris and San Francisco, Frac Ile de France and Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon and Frac Picardie. Her work is represented by Bureau NYC and Gregor Podnar in Vienna.
A portrait that cannot be ended.
A man who sells his soul.
A faceless spirit.
Soul and face are merely signs of human identity.
A short film about vampirism and mystery, directed by María Lorenzo in 2003, remastered in 2025.
María Lorenzo Hernández (born in Alicante, Spain, 1977) is one of Spain's most renowned animation filmmakers, whose short films have been selected, screened, and awarded in more than 40 countries. Nominated for the 2016 Goya Awards for The Night Ocean (2015), her short films pivot on a host of artistic disciplines—music, drawing, photography, and film—exploring different aesthetics and narrative styles through experimentation with rhythm and movement.
“Compositions for Understanding Relationships” is a short animated film that takes the shape of a “love letter.” This concept is examined as various forms of relationships are brought on throughout the film. Taken in out and out of the romantic context, the viewer gazes upon the dynamic play of the variables of composition such as color, form, balance, proportion, and unity. Bleeding images of the human form elicits the emotions of love.
David De La Fuente is an animation artist with interests in the moving image, semiotics, and graphic design. His work has explored themes of queerness, the aesthetic experience, and romanticism.
His films have shown in the Annecy International Animation Festival, Slamdance Film Festival, Melbourne Queer Film Festival, Ottawa International Animation Festival and others. In 2019, he was the recipient of the GLAS Animation Grant. He earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design.
Currently, David is based in New York where he continues his process of experimental storytelling and image making.
Ayla wakes up in a mountainous landscape, surrounded only by vegetation and a river. Driven by curiosity and a desire to understand the place around her, she embarks on a journey of discovery and immersion. As she discovers where she is, she also discovers herself.
Luma Flôres is an Brazilian director, illustrator, and animator. She founded Anomura Filmes, an animation production company focused on experimental and auteur-driven narratives. She directed and wrote the short film How a River is Born (2025), selected for more than 100 film festivals, including Tribeca Festival, DOK Leipzig and Animafest Zagreb. She has worked on more than ten short and feature films as an animator and background artist, most notably The Son Of a Bitch (Otto Desenhos and Estúdio Anaya), Jussara (Camila Ribeiro) and Ana, En Passant (Fernanda Salgado). In 2024, she was a resident at AniMAM, the Animation Research and Production Program held by Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro, and is currently developing her first animated feature film, In The Middle of Everywhere.
An identity, a burden, an escape, a symbol. The simplest thing we can share with others is our name, but it can also be one of the most complex. In this short documentary, a group of trans and queer people tell the stories of their names, and ask us to consider how a few simple words are meant to contain our whole person.
Matthew Baren is a British filmmaker and queer community organiser based in Hong Kong. He is a co-founder of CINEMQ, an underground queer cinema collective in Shanghai promoting a broader awareness of queer film, and generating discussion on LGBTQ+ experience and perspectives in China through screen culture. In 2018, he directed the documentary Extravaganza, which goes behind the scenes of a groundbreaking Shanghai drag show.