Midnight Rising

New York Premiere

Director   Aileen Ye
Country   UK, The Netherlands
Year   2024
Languages   English
Genre   Non-fiction
Running Time   8 min

Stepping onto the dance floor, we are invited to move and witness a space that extends beyond raving, extravagance and hyperpop to offer a necessary platform for love, acceptance and most importantly, joy.

The film features stories of those that have been boldly amplifying artists and creating moments of movement across the city, all intertwined by their deep love of music - Eastern Margins, a music label and collective that celebrates alternative East and South East Asian culture and diaspora, and GGI (kor: 끼), London’s only rave for queer, trans and nonbinary East and South East Asian people.

This film is part of Shorts: Love Letters To You program.

Director’s Statement

For the past few years, I’ve been seeking East and South East Asian centred spaces and  communities. Not just for stories, but also for my own respite from daily life.

Finding space, connection, forging joy and memories, are what brought me to these topics, in search of communities and stories which bond the Asian diasporic experience. For so long, the younger generations have been scattered, without many spaces to connect or find each other.

Hidden in pockets of London, this film showcases a different side to the Asian community not commonly known to audiences, or even ourselves. No one really knows the political and eccentric aspects of this Asian generation’s underground club scene. With this film, I wanted to explore the new sounds and discover what it is that brings so many different sub- communities together to one space - the club. Fashion, music, queerness take on new definitions and embodiments in this space.

What these Asian club collectives have put together is not only rare in terms of line-up, but also community. What exists in this space is more than just ‘raving’ from pressures of daily life, but ecstatic liberation and new-found families.

Director’s Bio

Aileen Ye (she/her​)

Aileen Ye (she/her) is an award-winning Irish-Chinese filmmaker from Dublin. Currently, she is based between London and Amsterdam.

Beginning in 2021, she is self-taught in her craft, learning filmmaking through DIY 16mm film labs. Her works utilise various mediums with a focus on contemporary subcultures and diasporic narratives. She holds a master’s degree (MSc) in Sociology from Erasmus University, focused on decolonising the aesthetics of moving-imagery and autoethnographic cinema. Her work has been shown internationally including the BFI, Barbican Centre, NOWNESS Asia, LUX, Michigan Theatre and more.

In 2022, she was the FOCUS Award Winner 2022 by EVCOM Clarion Awards. In 2023/24, she was awarded the Mondriaan Fonds. Her most recent film, ‘Midnight Rising’ (2024), won Best International Short Doc at the Dublin International Film Festival and selected for Official Selection at Ann Arbor Film Festival 2024.