Following the world premiere of Queerpanorama (眾生相) at the 75th Berlinale, the Berlin International Film Festival, where the film was in competition for the prestigious Teddy Award, filmmaker Jun Li and star Jayden Cheung speak exclusively with The Queer Review’s editor James Kleinmann.
Set in contemporary Hong Kong, the strikingly shot black and white film explores a twenty-something gay man’s (Cheung) journey of self-discovery as he impersonates the men he has sex with, bringing each new persona with him to his next hook-up. He first appears as an actor, but later he introduces himself as a scientist, then as a teacher, a delivery man, and an architect. He enters the various homes of the men he meets on a hook-up app, observes their living spaces and tells the stories that have been told to him, but reimagined for himself, receiving new and unpredictable reactions. At times he delights in this short-term intimacy with a stranger, while other encounters turn ugly and violent. He begins to feel like he is losing his grip on reality, until one day he meets the actor (Zenni Corbin).
Queerpanorama marks Li’s third feature as writer-director following the award-winning Tracey which premiered at the Tokyo International Film Festival in 2018 and Drifting which premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2021. Both Li and Cheung graduated from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in journalism and previously collaborated on a short film, My World, in 2018 when the actor was still in high school. Queerpanorama is Cheung’s acting feature debut.
James Kleinmann, The Queer Review: Jun, what does it mean to you to have Queerpanorama play in the Panorama section at the Berlinale? Given the title, it feels like destiny.
Jun Li: “I grew up in Hong Kong and watching films at the Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF) was the starting point of this journey. It was only about $2 USD a ticket when I was a student, so it was really affordable and I’d watch five films a day during the festival. Because of the timing of HKIFF in April it would include a lot of films from the Berlinale, so those were mostly the films that I’d watch growing up.”
“I really admire the Berlinale and the Panorama section in particular as a queer filmmaker. For me, those films were an awakening; sexually, politically, and culturally. So it’s been a dream for me to have a film at the Berlinale, especially in the Panorama section, and it shows in my title! Although, I truly didn’t think about that when I initially came up with the Chinese title, which essentially means “panorama” or “all living things”. The Chinese title and the concept that this would be a portrait of everyone came very early on in the process.”
“I hadn’t thought about calling it Queerpanorama in English until I was submitting it to the Panorama. I thought I’d try it out! It had been a long development process over about five years, but once we shot it and submitted it things went really fast. We finished shooting at the end of June 2024 and I submitted it at the end of October, so it was only about half a year from the end of our shoot to the premiere in Berlin.”
What was the initial spark of inspiration for the film and how autobiographical is it?
Jun: “It’s very much autobiographical. The inspiration happened when I was getting penetrated. It just came to me while I was having sex and I thought, ‘Oh, that would be a good idea!'”
JK: That’s funny because there is a moment in the first hook-up scene where Jayden’s character starts asking the scientist he’s just had sex with a science question and the guy says, ‘Is that what you were thinking about while we were having sex?’
Jayden Cheung: “I think it’s very usual for an artist to be in that state, observing and thinking about stuff while they’re doing something else, even if it’s while they’re having sex.”
Jun: “Yeah, exactly, and sometimes when you’re having sex you’re in another space. So the inspiration came to me during a sexual encounter that I had. Many times I’ve been with a sex partner who didn’t know that I was a director and I’d ask, ‘Would you want to be a movie star one day?’ That also happens in the film. I’d ask them that and I would get some very surprising answers. Like, ‘No, of course not’ or ‘Why not?’ or other things would come up like, ‘I want to be father one day’. That was one of the answers that I got from one of my sex partners. I thought that was very beautiful and I wanted to capture all of these beautiful moments in the film.”
“That was the starting point and I began writing the screenplay from there. I’d ask each person that I wanted to write about, ‘How much of your identity can I include in my film?’ Hong Kong is very small and these people are all foreigners, so if I was writing too explicitly then people would know who they were. The second question I asked was, ‘Would you want to play yourself in the film?’ Some of them agreed to it and they’re playing themselves. I also asked if I could use their apartments to shoot their scenes in.”
So sometimes it’s the actual person that you originally met on a hook-up app and their real home?
Jun: “Yeah, that’s right. All of those people are first-time, non-professional actors and many of them do actually work in the professions that they talk about in the film. For the people who were too shy to play themselves on camera we did an open casting call. That was a difficult and long process because we have characters from many different cultural backgrounds. There were a lot of different levels of experience when it comes to acting, so I tried my best to make it feel coherent throughout the film.”
Jayden, at what stage did you become involved and what was the draw for you of essentially playing Jun?
Jayden: “I was cast about two months before the shoot, but even before it was confirmed that I’d got the role I helped Jun to cast other roles and did chemistry reads with them. After I was officially cast I did a lot of research. Basically, it’s about Jun’s own experience so he was telling me more about that and gave me an insight into gay culture. I met a lot different people as part of that research and that’s when I started to get really engaged with this project.”
Jun: “When I first wrote the script I never thought about asking Jayden to play this role. I had initially imagined the character to be my age and Jayden’s about 10 years younger than me. I had an image of this character in my mind and it wasn’t him, so I told him that very directly.”
“When Jayden auditioned for the short film we did together he was only 15—he turned 16 on the first day of shooting—and I was very cautious about his age because that film was also about sexual awakening, but it wasn’t explicit. With Queerpanorama it’s a lot more explicit, so I really wanted him to think it through. He came into the audition for this film fully prepared and off-book for the entire scene. That was the point when I realized that he gave me the sense of security that I was longing for. Actors are often insecure people, but directors are too. At that point, I’d already got my DP Yuk Fai Ho, my production designer Prudie Leung, and the rest of my art team in place and I realized that Jayden was contributing to the sense of safety that I wanted for this project. So even though I’d told him a million times that he might not be suitable for the role, and that I’d already got someone else in my head, he ended up getting the part.”
You’d only worked together once before on a short film hadn’t you?
Jun: “Yeah, it was during Jayden’s last year in high school. After that, he went to the same college that I went to and got into the same circle that I’d been in and had a lot of the same teachers.”
Did you study acting?
Jayden: “No, we went to the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s School of Journalism and Communication. So we’re both trained reporters. The reason I went to that school was mainly influenced by Jun and his crew that I worked with on the short film. They are all people who I trusted and really looked up to while I was doing that film. I was just a high school kid but I could really feel how passionate and professional they were and it touched my heart deeply. I knew then that I really wanted to work with them all again. I think the trust between Jun and I started eight years ago and built from there.”
Jun, the film looks beautiful. What were your guiding principles for the visuals and why did you decide to shoot it in black and white?
Jun: “I made the decision to shoot in black and white very early on. It was mostly because I’m red-green colour blind, so I feel most expressive and confident in black and white. When I’m shooting in colour and a costume designer gives me two dresses to choose from they look exactly the same to me because I can’t see what everyone else sees, so I don’t know if they match or not. So that’s a huge nightmare. With black and white the production process is much smoother for me.”
“My DP and I decided to shoot from a distance because I wanted to show the interiors and to examine how this character walks into a stranger’s living space. I wanted to observe how the stranger exists in their own environment too, especially because some of these spaces are the real places where they live. I wanted to see how the main character explores and interacts with those environments. There are subtle moments when Jayden’s character is looking around and sometimes is not so focused on the conversation because he’s observing, meanwhile the other guy is more comfortable in their own space.”
“The framing reflects the architecture in Hong Kong. Even in the open spaces we wanted to make everything visually coherent. There is also this world that the character is creating and by the end of the film we have a tracking shot which feels like an opening up. The room he’s in is an empty space, so there’s a plain canvas at the end, which is also the beginning because there’s a circular structure to the narrative. So that was a more liberating shot.”
“There are different chapters and then we come to the conclusion—like in an essay—that incorporates many of the aspects that we touch upon in this character’s sex life. But it’s also the beginning of this story, so the framing is different with that shot and also with how that person is shot because Zenni, who plays the actor character Matthew, is obviously more special to me. No offense to anyone else. Everyone is unique, but Zenni is my partner in real life and he appears in every encounter in the film, even though he is not present physically.”
He’s mentioned in every scene so that brings him into the room. Jayden, there are a lot of long takes in the film, what were those scenes like for you as a performer?
Jayden: “I had a very close bond with the DP and because I have experience as a stage actor I didn’t really think about the long takes too much. I love doing them because it means that it’s up to the actor to control the tempo and many other aspects of the scene. When there are a lot of editing points they can kind of break your imagination as an actor in terms of how the scene will go. I really enjoyed the way those long takes allowed so many subtle moments that are very naturalistic and alive to come across.”
“We actually did quite a bit of rehearsal with the camera and worked out the blocking of each scene. We decided things like, this character moves here at that point, or this character looks at him then or doesn’t look at him at another point. We really broke down every scene and asked, ‘When do you talk? What’s your posture?’ I really enjoyed that process and I’m happy to see all of those details and choices read on screen so well.”
Jayden, your character takes on the name and profession of his previous hook-up when he meets the next one, were you thinking about taking on their physicality too?
Jayden: “Only very subtly because I didn’t want to change my character’s entire personality each time.”
Jun: “Jayden’s physicality is exactly how I conduct myself in any space. Jayden did a lot of work observing me and putting my physicality into his performance. Jayden doesn’t move or hold himself that way at all.”
Jayden: “Also, with the costumes there are some subtle connections between what my character wears and what the previous hook-up was wearing. It’s not exactly the same as the last character that I encountered, but there are certain qualities that give a little flavour of them to the main character.”
Jun: “Sometimes it’s more explicit, like he wears a button-down shirt after he meets up with the teacher who was wearing a button-down shirt.”
Let’s talk about the sex scenes. I love the way it doesn’t feel like there is an abrupt jump from a conversation to sex and back again. Instead, they flow into each other in a really natural way.
Jayden: “I think that’s just how it is when you’re having sex, the conversation comes up naturally. Sometimes it might be triggered by a painting or a poster on the wall. Sometimes it might be triggered by someone’s tattoo. You just start talking and getting to know each other. Sometimes you don’t know their name until after you’ve had sex, but it’s very natural to talk after you’ve been so intimate physically. Credit goes to the script because it was so subtle and well-written and it sounds naturalistic. It all started from Jun’s own experiences. He put them into his script and then me and the other actors tried to make those abstract words into something more tangible.”
Jun: “I told all the actors at the beginning that I hate to see characters in a film having sex wrapped up in a blanket or wearing clothes immediately after they’ve had sex because that doesn’t happen. In real life, we lay together for a while. Also, there’s the rush of the poppers, so you have to lay down for a while to make sense of this world again! That’s when you start talking. Sometimes, when you like that person you want to stay a little longer. If they smoke, then we’ll smoke together. We want to spend that time with each other; sometimes naked, sometimes not, it depends on the situation. So I told my actors that I wanted to go for a very naturalistic approach. The camera angles are the same for the sex scenes as they are for the conversations because they are treated the same way and they’re equally important in this film.”
There are two scenes that are the aftermath of encounters that have ended badly, perhaps violently. In one, we see Jayden’s character laying face down in an alleyway and later we see him face down naked on a beach. Both are quite confronting images, and I believe you actually shot the preceding sequences but decided not to include them in the final edit so it’s left to the audience to imagine what might have transpired.
Jun: “Yeah, we actually shot both of the scenes that happen before.”
Why did you decide to not include them?
Jun: “When I was thinking about what I wanted to reveal or not to reveal, I decided that something that isn’t revealed might be even more powerful and have an even bigger impact. When I showed the film with those scenes still included to people who’d read the script, some of them said that they’d imagined them to be even more violent and disturbing. I did my best with them but those two scenes had a different vibe to the rest of the film. Those were actually things that I experienced and I didn’t want to exaggerate or sensationalize them. It was a very difficult choice to make, especially cutting the second one, because it was extremely well-acted. But after I reassembled the film without those scenes I realized that it was actually much more powerful that way.”
We see Jayden’s character explore his gender expression after he dresses up in the lingerie that one of his hook-ups gives him and later he puts on makeup and rocks a fierce outfit when he goes to a nightclub. It’s an aspect of the film that resonates with the various conversations that he has about freedom.
Jun: “Well, we’re queer people and we try new things on our body. We try on different expressions. I’m the kind of person who doesn’t really put much effort into my looks anymore, but my partner does as you saw at the Berlinale premiere.”
Yeah, that gorgeous dark golden gown.
Jun: “Which we bought the day of the premiere. It was only 10 Euros at a thrift store. I was wearing his coat that he came in from New York wearing. So those are the things we do. Sometimes I experiment still, but it’s less and less frequent these days because I’m more lazy and getting older. I’m more into the most comfortable way of being right now.”
Jayden: “It’s a very natural thing to want to be beautiful and to dress up. I was really happy for the scene at the rave because of that beautiful outfit. It was marvelous and it changed how I behaved; how I posed; how I danced; and how I interacted with people. It was really amazing and beautiful and liberating.”
Jun: “He was so happy when he got that dress on because the rest of the wardrobe for the film was just my own clothes on his clothes.”
The film is mainly self-financed and you were working to a lower budget than your previous features, what impact did that have on you as a filmmaker?
Jun: “When you have a bigger crew it’s more costly and you have more stress making the film. When you have a smaller crew, the cost of a day’s shoot is smaller and you actually have more liberty to take risks and make mistakes. A lot of people say they’d like a bigger budget, but that can be a constraint because making mistakes is more costly so you’re less inclined to take risks artistically.”
“One drawback of being self-financed is that I can no longer see this film as purely art because it’s also a product. It’s not until you own a film that you can see it that way. It gives you a different attitude towards it. With my other films, I don’t own any part of them so I was only focused on the idealistic side of filmmaking. That is the part that I do miss a little. Once you get there, you can’t go back and you are aware of the market. You have to think about all the different ways you might be able to get your money back so that you can make another film. I’m already at that place and I can’t go back to being a virgin.”
Finally, what’s your favourite piece of LGBTQ+ culture or a person who identifies as LGBTQ+; someone or something that’s had an impact on you and resonated with you over the years?
Jun: “RuPaul’s Drag Race. The first time I watched Drag Race was on a United Airlines fight from the US back to Hong Kong. It was season two and I watched almost the entire season. I got to the final three but I couldn’t watch the finale because we arrived in Hong Kong! Before that I didn’t even know who RuPaul was. It left such a strong impression on me, but I didn’t know it would become such a big show.”
“Having grown up in Hong Kong, I didn’t get a lot of the references. Now when I rewatch that season it’s different because I’m more familiar with American culture and I have an American partner. Back then, I’d only done an exchange semester in LA and when you’re a foreigner it’s very difficult to understand a lot of those jokes. Now I spend half my time living in New York City and half my time in Hong Kong. Being gay is a big part of my identity and I love that even though we might live in very different parts of the world we have a shared identity and experience as gay people and I think that’s reflected in Drag Race.”
“There are very few Asian queens and they tend to be eliminated early on. The successful ones are funny queens like Jujubee. I loved Sasha Velour from early on in her season because she is so intellectual but also entertaining at the same time. That is something that I really look up to. So season nine is when I really got into the show and then I rewatched the previous seasons and the new ones from then onwards.”
“In terms of queer films, Klaus Händl’s Tomcat or Kater—which actually premiered at the Berlinale and won the Teddy in 2016—had the biggest impact on me. It’s hard for me to explain why. It’s a very slow and quiet film, it’s nothing like the films that I make, but it left such a strong impression on me for a very long time. It’s about a gay couple living in Vienna. They’re loving but they also have this depression vibe going on throughout. One of them kills their own cat and there’s nothing that can explain that action. It’s an incredible film.”
By James Kleinmann
Queerpanorama world premiered at the 75th Berlinale, the Berlin International Film Festival, and was in competition for the 39th Teddy Award.