Femininity is not a footnote: Visibility, present memory, and Southeast Asian queer cinema

Still from Juju vs The Possibility of Life, Love and Death

Amid a month-long itinerary of Pride events, two free screenings in Metro Manila carve out space for something rare: Southeast Asian films centering queer, trans, and feminine lives. Unapologetic, unsanitized, and unafraid to linger in discomfort. 

Lingua Franca, Isabel Sandoval’s intimate portrait of an undocumented Filipina trans woman in New York, was shown at the Metropolitan Theater in Ermita. Days later, The Dolls Will Live Forever, a curated lineup of shorts from Brunei, Indonesia, Myanmar, and the Philippines, played to a small but charged audience at Gateway Cineplex 18 in Cubao.

More than celebrations, these screenings were acts of remembering.

Because even as rainbow flags go up in shopping malls, the silence around real violence deepens. Trans rights advocate and former broadcaster Ali Macalintal was shot in an acupuncture clinic in General Santos. On the same day, the body of Kierra Apostol was reported to have been found in the Cagayan River.

READ: Two more trans women killed. Are queer lives truly safe in the Philippines?

Sandoval, speaking in a recorded video before the screening of Lingua Franca, shared what drove her to tell the story of Olivia, an undocumented trans Filipina in New York working as a caregiver. “I didn’t want to explain or justify who she was,” says Sandoval. “I just wanted to be with her—inside her longing, her loneliness, her small joys.”

Beyond advocacy, it was something messier and more intimate. A form of presence that resists erasure not with slogans, but with breath and gaze and stillness. Lived, existing.

And that might be what makes these films so vital. They ask us to sit with lives that are often unseen and, worse, unmissed. In a culture where femininity—especially queer, trans, brown femininity—is still treated as either ornamental or excessive, these films offer another possibility. Not just to be seen, but to be remembered.

Femininity is not a footnote

Before screening the six films curated by Jason Tan Liwag, the organizers of The Dolls Will Live Forever spotlighted the power and necessity of telling true, human stories of the queer feminine: “Individuals whose very existence expands and redefines our understanding of womanhood, femininity, embodiment, and joy.” It's a wake-up call about what recent Pride activations have overlooked, as, in the backdrop of recent history, a queer dating show only features masc-presenting gay men and Boys’ Love archetype couples get kiss-camed at Pride marches.

To be queer and feminine in the Philippines is to be asked to do everything and still be seen as extra. Beauty and color are celebrated only if they entertain. Femme-presenting queers—trans women, sapphics, drag performers, femme gay men—are expected to be useful before they’re allowed to command attention.

Lingua Franca disrupts that. Sandoval gives us Olivia: Discreet, soft-spoken, flawed, tired. A woman who has learned to lie gently, love cautiously, and stretch herself thin to support a family back home. Sandoval doesn’t moralize her. She seems to simply observe. In subway platforms, shared kitchens, hushed small talk. Her desires are not deliberately hidden, just set aside to make space for structural survival. Femininity here is not theatrical. It is weary. It endures.

That quiet labor threads through Budjang, a documentary about Asmin, a trans woman and Sangguniang Kabataan treasurer in a Muslim community in Zamboanga. They call her bantot, a term lodged between familiarity and insult. A recognition, in a sense, but not one she necessarily wanted for herself. It's just what's available to someone like her. What she does matters more than what she’s called. She walks to the barangay hall, drafts proposals, and leads with care. Her religious leader tolerates her because she's productive. Her neighbors call her a fashion model, walking the line between support and subtle mockery.

Still, she shows up. Every day.

Asmin estimates that 70% of her community doesn’t truly accept her. But she leads anyway, not because she is welcomed, but because she is necessary. Budjang doesn’t glorify this. It reveals the unspoken contract: Queer people can stay, as long as we’re useful. As long as we’re quiet.

This logic is everywhere. It’s what lets officials in Tarlac ban trans students from wearing dresses to graduation. It’s why sapphic storylines are still called “niche.” Why drag queens must be funny, but not furious and challenging.

And yet these films insist that femininity is not a supplement to queerness. It is central. Not just flourish but frame.

Fragments of memory, refusal, and fire

If femme visibility is the frame, then these films are its fragments: Scattered, incandescent, impossible to ignore.

Fragment 147 takes its name from Sappho: “Someone will remember us, I say, even in another time.” The line flickers across time, like the film itself. Sapphic lovers speak across history, illustrated and animated with such artful romance. Their art becomes memory. Their presence, living archive.

This insistence courses through Juju and the Possibilities of Love, Life, and Death. Juju is playful, speculative. She flirts, teases, doubts. The man across from her may be trouble. But the film gives her what so few do: Desire—and being desired—without punishment. The fantasy of a trans woman allowed to want without paying for it.

Budjang’s religious leader says he has “no problem with queers”—as long as they aren’t loud or weird. But what if the problem isn’t noise, but the discomfort of witnessing someone live freely in defiance of silence?

The films don’t shout. But they refuse to be polite. They hold a gaze longer than expected. In Attached, the film sees a drag queen grieve in her own cadence, as she tries to entertain and maintain vibrance in a cabaret while police officers coerce them to give routine payments for “security”. They resist the lure of neat moral arcs. Uncomfortable to watch, unforgettable in impact.

In these fragments, the feminine queer subject is recorded, reimagined, and made impossible to unsee. Like fragments, they cut.

Families, real or chosen, are where the fight is

In Budjang, Asmin shares how her grandparents raised her. Like a lot of Filipino families with queer children, the kinship is built on endurance. Still, for Asmin, her service becomes her shield. This is the kind of story we don’t often see during Pride: The feminine queer body not as spectacle, but as scaffolding.

Olivia in Lingua Franca is much the same. Not flamboyant or outwardly contrarian, just tired. She cleans after her Caucasian ward, sends remittances, evades immigration threats. But she is the center. Olivia is a woman who just wants to breathe, in all aspects of the word for an immigrant trans woman.

And maybe the most radical part? They stay. They don’t flee the families who misgender them, the systems that erase them. They persist. But they also imagine more.

That’s where Juju and the Possibilities of Love, Life, and Death opens a new path. Juju daydreams a rom-com starring herself—flirted with, adored. Not performing “realness,” but possibility. Her kinship is not blood or barangay, but fantasy with someone who literally speaks her language. And that’s a kind of family, too.

Across these films, queer femininity is rarely named, recognized, or protected. But it doesn’t vanish. It adapts. It stretches thin. It dreams anyway.

F-words liberates us from shadows

Before The Dolls Will Live Forever began, Solimar de Castro promised that, “These films do not ask for permission to exist.” Indeed, they persist, held together by collectives, collaboration, and care. “In a politically and socially fragile region (Southeast Asia), queer films give us a chance to be seen and heard on our own terms.”

And that’s what made these screenings—at the Metropolitan Theater and Gateway Cineplex—feel like small uprisings. Stories that let femme, trans, and gender-nonconforming lives unfold.

The introduction of The Dolls continues: “Activism doesn’t always carry a placard. Sometimes it’s in the shimmer of a bold red lip. Sometimes it’s in the subtle everyday acts of love and kindness.” Sometimes it’s in a film watched by a teenager in secret. Or in the breath someone takes when they finally see themselves on screen.

This June, the frame spoke clearly: The dolls are living.

Queer femininity in Southeast Asian cinema has long been treated as too much or too little. Difficult to archive, easy to dismiss. But these films bring it to the foreground as a fact instead of a stand-in that carries the weight of metaphors.

Olivia, Juju, Asmin—none of them are masc icons or protest symbols. They are here. Carrying families. Rewriting endings. Refusing to disappear.

We owe them more than claps at the end credits in theatre rooms with more empty seats than eyes. We owe them room in archives, grants, and classrooms. That’s the work now. To go beyond visibility for its own sake and to ask: Whose visibility? Whose voice? Whose film?

The dolls live. The femmes endure. The F-words—feminine, female, family, film—are what we gather, preserve, and pass on.

Not as shadows. As fire. As frame.