Celebrate Pride with these LGBTQ+ films from the Asian diaspora
Filmmakers from the Asian diaspora have been making queer and trans movies for decades. Check out some of our faves here!
"Saving Face" follows the complicated love story of two Chinese lesbians, Wil and Vivian.
Still frame from "Saving Face"
Words by Andy Crump
How best to celebrate Pride Month each year? Pop a bottle of champagne; grab brunch; go out in the streets for a parade, or any number of public events organized to mark the occasion; enjoy the loving solidarity of your peers and fellow celebrants, while basking in summer’s dawning glow. It’s June, after all! Remember to wear your sunscreen, and if the sun gets too hot, you can always acknowledge Pride by sitting in a dark space, kissed by air conditioning, and watch a good LGBTQ+ film, or several.
Queer cinema is as diverse as the list of activities people partake in to celebrate Pride. Why shouldn’t it be? Queer identity isn’t a monolith. There are as many ways to be queer as there are ways to dramatize lived queer experiences on screen. Queer lives are exuberant, and excruciating, and complex, funny, tragic, and somber all at once. Movies made about LGBTQ+ and queer characters should be no different. Now open up that formulation to include Asian and AA+PI lived experiences. The variations expand, with specific cultural mores about homosexual and transgender identities adding new sensations and emotions to intrinsically sensational, emotional profiles.
Here’s JoySauce’s list of recommendations for ringing in your Pride Month, on screens large and small.
Funeral Parade of Roses (1969, Toshio Matsumoto)
To watch Toshio Matsumoto’s Funeral Parade of Roses is to hope that the next movie you see shows even half as much abandon. This is an unapologetically unruly picture, stitching together the raw thrill of its depicted self-indulgences with a period backdrop. The effect here is twofold: wistfulness for the subcultures prominent in Matsumoto’s lens, excitement for the chance to see those subcultures thriving in spite of, or perhaps because of, their countercultural nature. Put in simpler language, Funeral Parade of Roses, a landmark entry in transgender cinema, is as punk rock as the movies get—and the bleakest you should watch this month.
Summer Vacation 1999 (1988, Shûsuke Kaneko)
Three living, breathing, flesh-and-blood boys meet the spitting ghostly image of their recently deceased friend, while ditched by their parents in their school dorms during summer vacation. Is this a horror movie’s plot summary, or the arc of Shûsuke Kaneko’s gender-bending shojo cinema classic, Summer Vacation 1999? (Hint: the second one.) It should be seen as a slight against movies everywhere that Kaneko’s masterpiece remains a rarity today. New York’s Japan Society presented its first screening in more than a decade in March 2022, for context. What a shame. Summer Vacation 1999 occupies the same hazy anti-reality of early Sofia Coppola, as well as the sharper-edged slice-of-life films of Lukas Moodysson, while predating them by more than a decade. The sly casting flourish, in which the leading quartet of boys are each played by androgenized girls, invests layers of subtext and meaning into this deceptively simple movie about young friendships complicated by coming of age.
The Wedding Banquet (1993, Ang Lee; 2025, Andrew Ahn)
Why attend one wedding banquet when you can attend two? The justification for remaking Ang Lee’s unassailable classic lies in how they differ. Lee focuses on tension between older and younger generations, whereas Ahn foregrounds the ways his younger characters relate to one another. There’s a wedding in both films, as well as a banquet, of course, with interrogations of sexual normativity placed in cultural contexts: Taiwanese in Lee’s, and Korean in Ahn’s. But Lee is concerned with the anxieties expressed by his protagonist, Wai-Tung (Winston Chao), who fears his parents’ reaction should he ever come out to them. Ahn bestows stronger progressive credentials on his proxies for those characters, and opts to explore the messes that his leading quartet—Bowen Yang, Han Gi-chan, Kelly Marie Tran, and Lily Gladstone—makes amongst themselves. As a double feature, The Wedding Banquets make a terrific diptych of queer Asian experience, two parts tenderhearted, one part raucous.
Saving Face (2004, Alice Wu)
Like A Nice Indian Boy (and, frankly, The Wedding Banquet), Alice Wu’s Saving Face trades in the feel-good market. Its basis is a circumstance that, for the many people who know it personally, likely feels anything but good. Waiting on tenterhooks to find out if your parent approves of, or at least accepts, your sexual orientation is a unique kind of torture. Wu doesn’t elide the pricklier side of that formula, and zeroes in on the pain a parent can inflict on their queer children through denial of their identity, as well as their dreams. In fact, she embraces the chafing discomfort of those experiences. But she builds Saving Face around comic setups and pay-offs, too, using humor as her scaffolding for those experiential motifs.
Miao Miao (2008, Cheng Hsiao-tse)
It’s shaky ground to invoke the great Wong Kar-wai as a comparison point for anything, ever, but be that as it may, there’s no clearer characterization of Cheng Hsiao-tse’s Miao Miao than as an episode of The O.C. directed by Wong. (Or 90210, or Degrassi. You get the idea.) Miao Miao (Ko Chia-yen) has a crush on Chen Fei (Wing Fan). Hsiao-ai (Sandrine Pinna) has a crush on Miao Miao. Chen Fei is off in his own world, insulated from observing how others regard him courtesy of his handy chunky noise-cancelling headphones. (Dudes are, as dudes are wont to do, oblivious to a fault.) There’s a question worth posing about whether LGBTQ+ cinema inherently must fixate on the pain intrinsic to being queer in a world curated by heteros, but if that pain is common among LGBTQ+ folks’ lived experiences, then the gut punch of Miao Miao’s final 15 minutes is earned via authenticity.
The Handmaiden (2016, Park Chan-wook)
Did the deflation of love languages by Canadian university researchers get you down last year? Take inspiration from Park Chan-wook: switch to color-coded language. In The Handmaiden, his adaptation of Sarah Waters’ 2002 novel Fingersmith, Sook-hee (Kim Tae-ri) is hired by the confidence man Fujiwara (Ha Jung-woo) to serve as the heiress Lady Hideko’s (Kim Min-hee) maid. Fujiwara means to seduce and marry Hideko, then commit her to an asylum after collecting her inheritance. But the gag’s on him! Sook-hee and Hideko fall in love. Park, in his typical style, seeks luxurious perfection in the film’s costuming and set decoration, and every single shot’s composition. Such is his auteurist essence. But the expectation of sumptuous visuals indirectly punctuates his decision to highlight subtitles for Korean dialogue in yellow, and Japanese dialogue in white, both logistically—if you don’t speak either language, the highlights are necessary to keep up with the plot—and subtextually: Korean is literally Sook-hee and Hieko’s love language when they speak with one another. Maybe this is unintended subtext, and maybe there’s more to write home about with this movie in regards to, say, graphic lesbian sex scenes. All the same, that one little gesture adds another layer of depth to one of Park’s greatest productions.
A Nice Indian Boy (2025, Roshan Sethi)
Some movies are equivalent to a relaxing warm bath, soothing but fleeting. Others, like Roshan Sethi’s delightful A Nice Indian Boy, are more like warm, sustained hugs that neither of the involved parties wish to break. Hugs are fleeting, too. But Sethi injects so much cathartic, life-affirming sentiment into A Nice Indian Boy that its effects linger. If it’s sappy to imagine what the next chapter looks like for Naveen (Karan Soni) and Jay (Jonathan Groff) following the film’s joyful climax, then we’re all sugar maples. Naveen, unlike Jay, is a nice Indian boy, prototypically shy in keeping with a swath of Soni’s roles in movies and television. Jay is not a nice Indian boy, but he was raised by a nice Indian foster family—he likes Bollywood movies, and he prays to Ganesh. Good enough. Unlike Soni, Groff is so closely associated with playing terrible people (hail, King George!) that seeing him play a man as normal as Jay comes as a jolt, smoothed over by his chemistry with Soni and by the film’s writing (courtesy of Eric Randall and Madhuri Shekar, whose same-named novel is Sethi’s source material).
Published on June 23, 2025
Words by Andy Crump
Bostonian culture journalist Andy Crump covers movies, beer, music, fatherhood, and way too many other subjects for way too many outlets, perhaps even yours: Paste Magazine, Inverse, The New York Times, Hop Culture, Polygon, and Men's Health, plus more. You can follow him on Bluesky and find his collected work at his personal blog. He’s composed of roughly 65 percent craft beer.