Hyde Park Pick: The Last Year of Darkness

This autumn we’re delighted to welcome the amazing Queer East back to the Hyde Park Picture House. Now in its 5th year, the festival exists to bring the best queer cinema from across East and South East Asia, to London and the UK – from forgotten classics, to bold new works from emerging filmmakers. Historically many of the marginalised filmmakers championed by Queer East have struggled screen their works in their native country, and so have relied on the festival to help their films reach an audience. 

Following our screening last month of the radical 1974 Japanese film Bye Bye Love, we have two more Queer East titles coming up. On Sunday, as part of our reRUN strand, we’ll play Tsai Ming-Liang's subversive Taiwanese drama, The River (which could easily have been this week’s Hyde Park Pick). But instead, we wanted to spotlight our third and final Queer East film, The Last Year of Darkness. 

Set in the large Chinese city of Chengdu, the film follows a group of performers, DJs, artists and party-goers – all lost souls, unable or unwilling to conform to city’s usual societal constraints, instead finding purpose, community and escape in Chengdu’s underground spaces and queer clubs.

An honest and unsanitised portrayal of what alternative life in contemporary China can look like, the documentary touches on a number of interesting themes – from the balancing act some have to play when attempting to lead two quite different lives, to how a lack of purpose and place among so many younger people is having a detrimental impact on their mental health. And while the hedonistic, and often messy lives of those captured by director Ben Mullinkosson can sometimes feel heavy and at times painful, there is joy, connection and community to be found too.

Ultimately it feels refreshing to see a film that neither victimises nor romanticises queer lives – the former a common trope when it comes to LGBTQ lives on screen, and the latter an increasingly common trend in recent years, as the mainstream appropriates more and more queer culture as a means to appear cooler and sell more stuff.

But of all the film’s many themes, its most striking one revolves around Funky Town - the queer-friendly club at the centre of the documentary, which is in an increasingly precarious position as the film progresses, thanks to the construction of a shiny new metro station nearby. The story of Funky Town, and its threatened future in the face of unstoppable development, is a story repeated in cities across the world and the UK – including here in Leeds.

Grassroots cultural and community spaces, from clubs and studios, to galleries and project spaces, are being lost today like never before. The sad closure of Clay, Sheaf St and The Tetley and many more in Leeds in recent times, is making the future of similar cultural and queer-friendly venues feel more uncertain than ever. The dozens of creatives based in Aire Street Workshops are still fighting to save their eviction, and recently MAP Charity began a petition against a new residential development in Mabgate which threatens the future of the organsiation and their amazing education work. Grassroots group No Space Left to Play has recently formed to try and organise a response to this growing trend, which if left unchecked, threatens to dismantle yet more of the city’s alternative, queer-friendly infrastructure, forcing people into less safe and more homogeneous, transactional spaces. 

When looking for an antidote to all this doom and gloom, I'm happy to return to the film and the brave and beautiful drag performer Yihao. Despite his struggles, and uncertainties of what lies ahead, Yihao is accepted by more in Chengdu than you might think – not just the crowds in the club as he performs Bowie's Life on Mars?, but by the taxi driver who stops for him and shares a joke when others had driven by, and his elderly grandma, who after asking Yihao about his life decisions, concedes: ‘If you feel good about yourself, it’s fine’. It's a reminder that when it comes down to it, a bit of love, self-worth and acceptance is all any of us really need. 

The Last Year of Darkness screens at HPPH on Tue 19 Nov at 18:00. More info and tickets are available here.