Queer East is a cross-disciplinary festival that showcases boundary-pushing LGBTQ+ cinema, live arts, and moving image work from East and Southeast Asia and its diaspora communities. Their sixth edition runs from 23 April to 18 May 2025 in venues across London, exploring notions of what it means to be queer and Asian today.
The festival was established in response to the systemic lack of Asian representation on the big screen, onstage, and behind the scenes. Global events over the past few years have once again reminded us that fair and authentic racial and sexual representation is crucial for our society. The richness of Asian and queer heritage forms a vital part of this country’s identity. Through a diverse and forward-thinking programme, the festival aims to amplify the voices of Asian communities and challenge the conventional norms, labels, and stereotypes associated with queer Asian portrayals.
Working collaboratively with allies across the film, arts, and cultural sectors, they hope to join the forces bringing about change in screen culture and to enable an open space for everyone to explore the contemporary queer landscape across East and Southeast Asia.
On her first day at a new all girls Catholic school Ace (Pat Tingjuy) finds herself something of an outcast. She has no friends in the school, she feels slightly awkward and out of place, and she's already annoying the school's star volleyball player Jana (Aya Fernandez). However, she soon catches the eye of the coach Jules (Agot Isidro), who sees something special in Ace. Learning that Ace used to play basketball, she gets Ace to agree to try out for volleyball instead, promising her that if she can help get the team to the championships she'll try to convince the nuns to make a basketball team; something the nuns have refused to do as it 'makes girls gay'.
Despite some difficult first days on the team, Ace has some one on one training with Coach Jules and demonstrates some decent skills. This fails to warm her up to Jana though, who still views Ace as someone who just walked onto her team and got all of her attention. During a weekend training camp the two of them learn more about each other, and realise that they actually make pretty decent friends. As that friendship blossoms into something deeper, the two of them have to deal with the challenges they face as a young queer couple in a competitive, and sometimes hostile world.
Rookie begins less as a romance movie, and feels like a teen drama for the first half of the film, and the way the story is presented it's very unclear if this would in fact become a romance piece, or if this would present a more stark series of events. Part of that feeling came from the fact that there's no indication of when the film is set. The teens don't have smart phones, there's no real background technology like computers or television, there aren't even any vehicles to date things. The film has a somewhat timeless quality to it that allows it to occupy this space where it could be set anywhere within the last forty years.
The lack of knowledge of the time, as well as myself having little real knowledge of queer rights in the Philippines, meant that I was unsure if I would be watching a film in which our protagonist would be facing ostracization for being a member of the queer community. Luckily, Rookie is pretty far from being a dark film, even if it does tackle some darker subject matter from time to time. Instead, it's a rather sweet story about two girls falling in love with each other and learning to find happiness in the world around them.
As someone who's not always a fan of romance movies I appreciated that Rookie doesn't lean too heavily into the tropes of the genre, and doesn't try to make itself too cheesy. There's an element of the 'enemies to lovers' romance sub-genre at play in Rookie, but even then it's feels like small nods. Ace and Jana don't really hate each other, and even when Jana is being the 'bitch' archetype of the popular girl who's been pushed to the side for the exciting new person, she never comes across as cruel or unpleasant. It helps that we see some insight into her home situation and learn that she's facing some difficulties with her father that might be leading her to take out that frustration on Ace. Perhaps the most on the nose 'enemies to lovers' moment is when the two of them are assigned a double bed at volleyball camp rather than a bunk bed, and have to share. However, it never really plays into the story, and there's none of the expected 'made to share a bed' scenes that romance stories can sometimes play with.
Instead of making the romance overt it was almost subtle, and whilst it was obvious that Ace had feelings for Jana very early on it wasn't until the two of them were sitting close to each other, limbs gently touching, sharing longing stares, that I even knew Jana shared similar feelings. It came both as a surprise, but also felt wonderfully natural, and there were a couple of times where they'd lean in close to whisper something to each other that I'd be urging them on to say something romantic, or perhaps even steal a kiss.
The first real romantic moment that comes in their relationship is their school prom, where Jana tells Ace that she needs to ask her before someone else does; resulting in Ace quietly claiming Jana as 'mine'. You feel so excited to see the two of them step out in public together, to get their romantic date, that you forget what their school is. It's not until Ace is being denied entry by one of the nuns for being 'immodest' and 'inappropriate' for wearing her fathers suit, and told that no queer dates are allowed, that the reality of the moment hits home. The quiet disapproval that they receive from the religious school staff is one of the challenges that they have to face as they come together, the strange looks, or pointed comments about how they're sinners.
Unfortunately for them, and the rest of their teammates, this isn't the only conflict in the film, as we learn that the team's physical therapist Kel (Mikoy Morales) has been sexually assaulting all of the girls on the team. It's a very dark topic, but director Samantha Lee handles it with extreme care, and Rookie addresses the issue in a careful way. It's a storyline that builds across the film, and one that a darker movie could have dedicated more of it's time to, or had as something that caused more trauma and hardship for the characters, but it ends up being dealt with quickly and well, even if not perfectly.
This plays a little into my only real problem with the movie, it's too short. The film sits at 95 minutes, which doesn't make it short by any means, but it does also move with a pretty quick pace. Ace and Jana start to come together as a couple quickly, yet we never slow down to really spend much time with the two of them just being girlfriends. The girls decide to do something about their abuser, and the school gets rid of him in the next scene. Even the subplot about Ace not feeling comfortable in the small, revealing volleyball uniform gets resolved within five minutes. Rookie crams a lot in, and none of it is bad, but it does mean that there are times where you end up wanting more. I don't know if a longer runtime would have helped, perhaps giving us a chance to have those quieter moments or to allow stories to spend more time taking place, but I certainly would have been happy to have had the film sitting closer to the two hour mark.
But that's my only real complaint. The script has some lovely moments, and the characters all feel pretty genuine and realistic. Ace and Jana are played wonderfully by Tingjuy and Fernandez, and their chemistry feels very relaxed yet compelling. Even the volleyball league story is engaging and gets you interested. Everything just works for Rookie, to the point where it became one of those films where I'm sad it's over when the credits final roll. As the first film from the Queer East Festival that I got the chance to sit down and watch it felt like a fantastic introduction, and I can only hope that more of their programme is like this.
Rookie is playing as part of the Queer East Festival 2025. To find out more about Queer East click here.
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