The Prism award is generously supported by
Volume BEAT

Recipients of lifetime achievement awards are rarely as young as the recipient of our Prism Award this year. Fan Popo is only 26, but he's already contributed more to the gay community than many people twice his age. Independent film-maker (with 7 films to his credit), writer (of the first book about queer cinema published in China) as well as gay activist (organizer of the Beijing Queer Film Festival, the China Queer Film Festival Tour, Executive Director of the Beijing LGBT Center) , Fan has certainly kept busy these 4 years since graduating from the prestigious Beijing Film Academy, where he won a first-class scholarship.

As a film-maker, it was his short film 'New Beijing, New Marriage' that most brought him to international prominence - China Daily published photos taken during filming of a lesbian couple in wedding dresses, and claimed that this was a sign of China's growing homosexual tolerance! But it's perhaps as an activist that he has most made the greatest contribution. He co-founded the China Queer Film Festival Tour in 2008, where he and his colleagues travelled the length and breadth of that vast country showing LGBT films in eighteen cities. Despite their low profile (relative to the brouhaha that surrounded the 5th Beijing Queer Film Festival, which got shut down by the government), the Film Festival Tour has generated much international support, with British indie actress Tilda Swinton captured wearing one of their famous "We want to watch homosexual movies" t-shirts.

Fan Popo is a bright star in a bright new generation of Chinese gay men who are becoming increasingly vocal in their call for equal rights. With his films as well as his activism, Fan is showing the heterosexual Chinese community that being gay is nothing to be ashamed of. We at the HKLGFF are proud to be able to present our Prism Award this year to Fan Popo and together with him hope for a more open, more equal and more tolerant future.