The boldest and most playful version of this idea comes in Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s A Useful Ghost (2025). The film moves through a dual narrative. In one, a self described academic ladyboy, overwhelmed by the dust stirred up by his city’s renewal projects, buys a hoover to clean his apartment, only to hear it coughing at night, haunted by the handsome ghost Krong. In the other, Nat, the dead wife of March, returns by possessing a hoover after she and their unborn child die of respiratory disease. March is the younger son of Suman, the owner of an electronics factory, whose conservative in-laws never accepted Nat as a daughter in law. To prove herself as a ghost and stay with March, Nat becomes useful not only to Suman’s family, but also to the powerful figures disturbed by ghosts from the people killed during the 2010 Thai military crackdown. She becomes the titular useful ghost.
Yet the more useful Nat becomes to those in power, the more she seems to lose herself. She is a queer soul caught between life and death, human and machine, but usefulness turns her into something much more frightening: a ghost who helps the living erase other ghosts. In this world where ghosts survive only when being remembered by someone, the ghosts of political violence victims come back with anger, refusing to let the truth be buried. When Nat wipes away those memories, she is not just helping authority tidy up its haunted house. She is helping it decide which version of memories are allowed to remain.
That betrayal cuts back into her own existence as a ghost. March, whose memory keeps Nat as a ghost, would rather remember the victims of state violence than the ghost she has become. This is where A Useful Ghost becomes more than a brilliant comic conceit. Its absurdity opens onto something bitter: queerness can also be made useful, cleaned up, acquired into power, and turned against other marginalised lives. Around Nat’s haunted hoover, the film gathers inequality, historical trauma, dust pollution, religion, and workplace dispute, until queer resistance no longer looks like a separate struggle, but part of a much larger, dirtier world.
Across these three films, my first impression of Queer East begins with a physical image: people dancing freely behind bars. By the end of the programme, that image no longer remains just an image. It becomes a way of seeing how queer freedom is fought for across different lives and histories, how self-doubt is as much an inhibitor to freedom, and how one needs to challenge oneself to refuse the cage. In 3670, Montréal, My Beautiful, and A Useful Ghost, queer life is not simply about escaping the cage. It is about finding, in the end, the voice to say: this is what I am.
Darla Timwell
Queer East by name alone may seem to suggest a narrowly defined corner within today’s densely populated film festival landscape, but the festival distinguishes itself through an adventurous curatorial emphasis on the experimental and the politically engaged. In exploring a vast breadth of form across various geographies, Queer East, now in its 7th year, resists framing queer Asian cinema as a niche category within a single framework. This strength of the festival lies within its open curatorial vision, inviting a litany of curators to piece together distinct programmes. The connective thread that emerges from the programmes covered here, though wildly disparate in form, is a scrutinising of the authorities which shape cultural narratives and a questioning of the hierarchies that mediate myth, memory, and bodies.
The 2011 South Korean documentary, The Girl Princes, directed by Kim Hye-jung, was screened at Centre 151 in Hackney, an independent charity and home to a low-cost acupuncture clinic, among other things. The film itself is a low-budget doc exploring female Gukgeuk, a form of musical theatre immensely popular in the 1950s, in which an all-female cast plays both gender roles. The doc takes a talking-head format to interview the veteran practitioners (now well into their 70s), who recall with bravado, their working-class backgrounds, the radical choice to uproot their lives against the conservative milieu of 1950s South Korea, and the hoards of fangirls who would fawn over the them.