KCL Strand Film Festival: Growing Up In Avoidance - Sinophone Short Films

The 9th KCL Strand Film Festival presents Growing Up In Avoidance, a specially curated programme bringing together five short films exploring how we grow into ourselves not through confrontation, but through learning to live with what cannot be spoken, named, or resolved. 

Across works by Sinophone filmmakers studying or working between different cultural contexts, these films attend to forms of experience that resist direct articulation, tracing how experience is often displaced into gesture, rhythm, and fragmented encounters.  Shaped by diasporic conditions, these works reflect an ongoing negotiation between self and environment, where meaning often emerges obliquely rather than openly declared. 

Each film moves through a different register of discomfort. Experimental documentary Modern Masturbation Allegory (LI Xinyi, 2024) follows a young woman who, caught between compulsion and shame, begins collecting stories of female masturbation, turning private struggle into shared confession. In Shape of the Elephant (2023), award-winning animator Sam Kuwa explores a coming-of-age process shaped by sexual shame, gradually working through a demystification of desire and the meanings attached to it. 

Zhu Yunyi's mesmerising documentary Of Dreams in the Dream of Another Mirror (2023) moves through shifting reflections on mirrors, vision, and selfhood, where seeing no longer guarantees knowing, and existence feels contingent on being perceived. A drama about love, womanhood and independence, The Shuttle (Lu Han, 2018) provides a window into a life of an immigrant Asian woman and her fractured marriage. Finally, Will You Look At Me (Shuli Huang, 2022) documents a son’s attempt to speak to his mother about sexuality and acceptance, capturing a moment where recognition remains fragile and incomplete.

Together, these films move between disclosure and restraint, tracing how personal experience is shaped, shared, and sometimes held back.

With thanks to Cathayplay

The KCL Strand Film Festival (25 March - 1 April 2026) is curated by students on the Film Festivals and Film Festival Studies module in the Department of Film Studies at King's College London.