Outcasts

“If they don’t go to the park, where can these little fairies go?” Auntie Man asks her friend Master Yang. The two of them have adopted a young group of gay men – A-Qing, Little Jade, Mousey and Wu Min – who live at their apartment and form a community of solidarity. When night falls, the New Park in Taipei emerges as the ‘Dark Kingdom’, with its proud lotus pond and pavilion in the middle. A site of connection, a site to hang out and cruise. Outsiders become insiders as their lives unfold in mid-1980s Taiwan.

Outcasts by Yu Kan-Ping was the first gay-themed Taiwanese film to be produced officially. The film is based on the 1983 novel Crystal Boys by Pai Hsien-yung, which in turn is influenced both by Taiwan’s modernist and nativist movement in 1960s and 1970s, while its film adaptation is inspired by the Taiwan New Cinema of the early 1980s. A fabulous queer classic that leaves your heart filled with joy!