MCR ESEA PRIDE: Film screening of Wong Kar-wai's "Happy Together"

SPECIAL OFFER: The first 20 tickets are 2 for 1, so why not bring along family and friends? While stocks last!

Thanks to a grant kindly awarded to us by Manchester Pride's Community Fund in 2023 and SDKA Ltd., we are able to screen the 1997 Wong Kar-wai classic "Happy Together" at Queer Lit & Social Refuge for Manchester's queer ESEA community and our allies just in time for Manchester Pride!

"Happy Together" stars two of Hong Kong's greatest actors of their generation, Leslie Cheung and Tong Leung Chiu-wai, and is considered not just one of Asia's but the world's most awarded, famous and critically-acclaimed films in LGBTQ cinema.

Ticket sales help fund Voice ESEA's future projects, including our annual ECHO (ESEA Collective: History, Over here) exhibition.

Who are Voice ESEA?

Voice ESEA is an educational non-profit with one vision: to empower top-down, data-driven change towards societal equality for the East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) community in the UK.

Our mission is to, through our data project, look to provide top-down changemakers with the resources necessary to prioritise regional community support.

At the heart of all of our resources and events, inclusive of MCR ESEA PRIDE and ECHO, we uplift ESEA voices and create spaces for the British community to safely discuss belongingness.

About Happy Together

One of the most searing romances of the 1990s, Wong Kar-wai’s emotionally raw, lushly stylised portrait of a relationship in breakdown casts Hong Kong superstars Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung as a couple traveling through Argentina and locked in a turbulent cycle of infatuation and destructive jealousy as they break up, make up, and fall apart again and again.

Setting out to depict the dynamics of a queer relationship with empathy and complexity on the cusp of the 1997 handover of Hong Kong - when the country’s LGBT community suddenly faced an uncertain future - Wong crafts a feverish look at the life cycle of a love affair that’s by turns devastating and deliriously romantic.

Shot by ace cinematographer Christopher Doyle in both luminous monochrome and luscious saturated colour, Happy Together is an intoxicating exploration of displacement and desire that swoons with the ache and exhilaration of love at its heart-tearing extremes.

Accolades

• Won the 1997 Cannes Film Festival award for Best Director and nominated for the Palme d'Or
• Tony Leung won Best Actor at the 17th Hong Kong Film Awards
• Won the award for Best Cinematography at the 34th Golden Horse Awards
• Nominated for the Best Foreign Film at the 14th Independent Spirit Awards
• `Ranked the 3rd greatest LGBT film of all time in a 2016 British Film Institute poll
• Ranked the 71st greatest foreign-language film of all time in a 2018 BBC poll
• Described as "the most acclaimed gay Asian film" and one of "7 beautiful Asian movies that celebrate LGBTQ+ romance" by South China Morning Post