With its raw honesty and bold vision, Queerpanorama — directed by Jun Li — is making waves as 2025’s most provocative LGBTQ+ film out of Hong Kong, shattering taboos around queer identity, intimacy, and the often fraught search for belonging in a fractured city. The black-and-white drama transforms hookup culture into a cinematic journey: a nameless gay man drifts between encounters, adopting each partner’s persona in an ever-shifting mosaic of desire, loneliness, and self-invention — a deeply meditative exploration of identity that lingers long after the credits roll.
Premiering in the Panorama section at the 2025 Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale), Queerpanorama introduced audiences to a film unafraid of stripping down barriers — both societal and cinematic. The protagonist’s journey is less about a stable identity and more about the fragile fragments one collects in seeking connection in a city that often feels indifferent. As the character slips on the skins of lovers from different backgrounds — an architect one night, a foreign actor the next — the film suggests identity itself can be as fluid and fragile as one’s emotional needs, especially in a place like Hong Kong, where tradition and modern flux collide.
For Jun Li, this was not just storytelling — it was personal truth. As he told a 2025 interview with Tatler Asia, the film draws on his own experience of open relationships during the pandemic: “Whenever we met someone new separately, we had to tell this person that we had a boyfriend.” Told from a gay perspective, Queerpanorama rejects the tragic tropes often expected of queer cinema in Hong Kong — a world where, as Li himself noted, LGBTQ+ stories remain small and marginalized, frequently consigned to the fringes of indie or arthouse circuits.
Visually, the film’s stark 4:3 aspect ratio and grainy monochrome cinematography evoke both intimacy and alienation, a perfectly calibrated medium for a story about transient encounters and shifting selves. During its New York premiere at the School of Visual Arts Theater, Li said the theater even moved its curtains to honour the film’s original framing — a small gesture that underscored Queerpanorama’s commitment to preserving the intimacy and immediacy of its vision.
Yet for all its beauty and ambition, the film’s reception has not been without tension. Some critics praise its boldness and emotional power; others note a sense of unevenness — particularly in performances outside the lead, and a narrative ambition that occasionally outpaces the film’s ability to fully ground its myriad identities and stories. Nonetheless, Queerpanorama remains, at its core, an unflinching portrait of queer life in contemporary Hong Kong — a portrait deeply shaped by social realities, intimate longing, and the question of what it means to be seen in a city built on speed, anonymity, and transformation.
Recognition is coming fast: in November 2025, Jun Li was awarded Best Director at the Golden Horse Awards, the highest-profile film prize in the Chinese-language world, affirming that Queerpanorama is not just controversial — it’s culturally and artistically significant.
In a region where LGBTQ+ stories are still often silenced or sanitized, Queerpanorama stands out for its candour, its refusal to romanticize or moralize. Instead, it holds space for complexity: for sexual desire, ephemeral intimacy, alienation, and the constant flux of identity that many queer individuals navigate. For Hong Kong — and perhaps much of Asia — this film may mark a turning point: a new kind of queer cinema that does not seek redemption or approval, but simply demands to be seen.
If there is one thing Auntie loves more than a well-timed plot twist, it’s a queer film that refuses to die quietly—especially in Asia, where the censors clutch their pearls harder than my ex clutching his last shred of dignity. And yet, look around: our queer storytellers are thriving, defying box office expectations, working with shoestring budgets held together by tape, sweat, community love, and probably one borrowed camera from a cousin who used to shoot wedding videos. And guess what? These films still shine brighter than the mainstream blockbusters drowning in hetero clichés and product placement.
Let’s be real: the financial ecosystem for queer cinema across Asia is basically “DIY or die.” Grants? Rare. Government support? Only if the script is straight as bamboo. Corporate sponsors? They’ll happily wave rainbow flags every June but won’t put a cent into queer filmmakers telling the stories that matter. So our directors hustle. They crowdfund. They beg, borrow, steal locations. They shoot at night because daytime permits are too risky. And somehow the final product—raw, intimate, brave—moves audiences more than any over-produced studio flick.
And don’t get Auntie started on censorship boards: these self-appointed guardians of “morality” who think two men holding hands will corrupt society, but violence, misogyny, and corruption on screen? Totally fine! Across the region, queer films are trimmed, muted, blurred, banned, or forced into “arthouse niche” corners—as if queer love were some exotic plant needing controlled lighting. But these censors always underestimate one thing: queer people’s creativity and sheer stubbornness. If they cut a kiss, audiences will imagine ten more. If they ban a film, bootlegs multiply like bunnies. Every act of censorship only proves how powerful queer cinema actually is.
And then come the bigots, those loud, insecure uncles who panic whenever a film suggests that LGBTQ+ people exist, love, dream, suffer, triumph. They protest screenings, harass actors, scream “Western agenda” while wearing Western-brand polo shirts. Bless their hearts—queer cinema terrifies them because it shows a world where people can be free, and nothing is more dangerous to fragile masculinity than unfettered joy.
But here’s the twist, darling: despite all this, queer films across Asia are winning awards, selling out festivals, going viral, touching hearts in tiny villages and mega-cities alike. Every frame is resistance. Every premiere is a revolution. Every queer filmmaker is a fighter armed with a lens.
Keep filming, my rainbow warriors. Auntie sees you. Auntie cheers for you. And Auntie knows you’re changing the region, one forbidden love story at a time.