The Queer Art of Surviving a Pandemic: An Online Workshop with Popo Fan, February 19

In this online event, Berlin-based Chinese queer filmmaker Popo Fan will lead an online workshop on queer community building and care work for members of the LGBTQ+ communities. In the first half of the event, Fan will screen his new films made during COVID-19 including Learn German in My Kitchen and Hasen Pavilion. He will also share his experience of dealing with racism and loneliness during the pandemic, as well as how he has managed to remain positive, optimistic, and productive during the lockdown period. The making and sharing films, for Fan, is a way to participate in queer community building and care work through online and art-based activism.

The second half of the event will invite members from the audience to ask questions, share their experiences of coping with racism, homo- and transphobia, and COVID lockdown. This workshop hopes to build an online support community through storytelling, experience sharing, and engaging with artworks.

Popo Fan is one of the most prolific queer filmmakers from China. He has made more than a dozen documentary and fiction films, most of which revolve around issues of queer sexuality, identity and community. Fan started to participate in queer activism since his university days. He is a committee member of the Beijing Queer Film Festival (aka Love Queer Cinema Week); he is also a founder of the Queer University Video Training Camp. Fan is an important participant in and witness to the queer filmmaking and queer activism scenes in the PRC today.

The event takes place on February 19 and will be chaired by Hongwei Bao (Centre for Contemporary East Asian Cultural Studies, UoN)

Please use the following Teams link (or code) to participate in the event:

Teams link:

https://teams.microsoft.com/l/channel/19%3acc48ef934e994c29a3995f99b95fa952%40thread.tacv2/General?groupId=eed524bf-65fa-4eca-bbf6-3ed12a0f071b&tenantId=67bda7ee-fd80-41ef-ac91-358418290a1e

Teams code: savgj3p