Following police pressure, the independent queer film festival in the Chinese capital, Beijing, was abruptly canceled. The Love Queer Cinema Week, also known as the Beijing Queer Film Festival, had been slated to run from October 30 through November 8 in Beijing. According to the British newspaper The Guardian, the cancellation apparently followed a campaign of sustained harassment by authorities. In recent weeks, the police intensified the pressure on the festival with repeated phone calls.
The festival team, in a statement posted on Instagram on Thursday, offered no reasons for the cancellation. “We deeply apologize for the inconvenience and the disappointment this has caused to everyone who intended to participate or was looking forward to the film week,” the statement read.
The festival was founded in 2001 by students at Peking University and, as the only film festival on the mainland, provided a public platform for films and discussions about queer topics. Several international filmmakers whose works were selected for this year’s program had already traveled to China, The Guardian reports.
Maya Wang, deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch, told the newspaper that the government under Xi Jinping continually tightens social and ideological control. “A queer film festival is basically exposed to all of these overlapping pressures.” Hongwei Bao, a professor of Chinastudies at the University of St Andrews, spoke of a chilling effect on China’s queer community.
Earlier in June, screenings of queer films at the Beijing Institut Français were canceled after police pressure during Pride Month.
