华语酷儿电影活档案

“华语酷儿电影活档案”由文化实践研究者、独立电影人兼策展人吴漫发起，崔子恩担任顾问，致力于以去中心化方式保存、研究并再激活这一脆弱却持久的文化实践。

在官方档案缺席、酷儿影像被删除或禁映的现实中，华语酷儿电影多在”存在一被消失一乍现”的节律中呼吸。它们难以进入可检索的正史，却凭借零散放映、非正式流通与口耳相传在边缘延续。缺失的从不是一两部影片，而是一段被反复割裂的情感与社会史——一部尚未被体制书写却切实存在的华语酷儿电影史。北京酷儿影展二十五年来以游击放映与社群网络，持续保存并见证了这段记忆。因此，档案之为档案，不是封存，而是为影像争取继续被看见、被记起、被研究的权利。

在命名上，我们既不希望它只是静态、与实践脱节的”数据库”，也不愿将”为酷儿电影正名”固化为”资料馆”，因此选择”活档案”。”存档”不应成为项目的终点。不同于以稳定性与唯一性为标准的官方档案，活档案主张过程即内容：一次放映、一场讨论、一次资料更正，皆是归档事件的一部分。它以去中心化为组织逻辑，由多方共同照看与决策。活档案的优势不在体量，而在韧性与可持续：在政治与技术的波动中，通过多处保存、分级查看与跨城协作，维持可见与可用。

我们的方法是行动性的：保存，指向影像与文献的收集、编目与数字化；重现，通过口述、工作坊与策展，让被压低的声音在新的语境中出现；再激活，以创意性的使用让档案回到公共。技术层面，我们与制度化存档并行对接：采用通用描述标准、共享接口，建立跨地域的同步保存与访问策略，在开放与保护之间求得平衡。

我们不追求权威叙事；只要放映继续，档案就仍在更新——放映即归档。

吴漫
活档案创立人

THE LIVING ARCHIVE — QUEER CINEMA IN CHINESE CONTEXTS

The Living Archive — Queer Cinema in Chinese Contexts was initiated by independent filmmaker-curator Jenny Man Wu, with Cui Zi’en as advisor, and is committed to preserving, studying, and reactivating this fragile yet enduring cultural practice through decentralized collaboration.

In the absence of official records—and amid the deletion or banning of queer images—queer cinema in Chinese contexts lives in a rhythm of presence—being ‘disappeared’ —sudden reappearance. Seldom admitted into searchable canons, it survives at the edges through community-run, mobile guerrilla screenings, informal circulation, and word of mouth. What is missing is not a title or two, but an affective and social history repeatedly fractured—an institutionally unwritten, yet undeniably real history of queer cinema in Chinese contexts. For twenty-five years, the Beijing Queer Film Festival has kept this memory alive, bearing witness through guerrilla screenings and community networks. Archiving, therefore, is not storage but the work of keeping images visible, remembered, and researchable.

In naming this project, we refused both a static, practice-detached ‘database’ and a ‘museum’ that would fix the task of legitimizing queer cinema; hence the Living Archive. For us, archiving is a practice in motion—not an endpoint. Process is content: a screening, a conversation, a correction to the record—each becomes an archival event. Our collaborative archiving practices operate within a decentralized, community-led stewardship model—multi-party care and collective decision-making, rather than a one-way ‘donation–reception’ pipeline. Our strength lies not in volume but in resilience and sustainability. Amid political and technical volatility, we maintain visibility and usability through multi-site preservation, tiered access, and inter-city collaboration.

Our approach is action-based: preserve — collect, catalog, and digitize films and documents; reenact — through oral histories, workshops, and curatorial practice, bring silenced voices into new contexts; reactivate — return the archive to the public through creative uses. Technically, we cooperate in parallel with institutional archives: aligning descriptive standards, sharing interfaces, and building transregional systems for synchronized preservation and calibrated access—balancing openness with protection.

We do not seek an authoritative narrative; so long as screenings continue, the archive keeps updating — to screen is to archive.

Jenny Man Wu Founder of The Living Archive