ESEA (East and Southeast Asian) Heritage Month Creates a Chance to Celebrate ESEA stories and Bring Community Together

It’s September, which means ESEA (East and Southeast Asian) Heritage Month is here again. For those in Edinburgh, it also means a special community preview screening of Hope, which MilkTea is teaming up with ESEA Creatives to screen at Cameo Picturehouse on 23rd September.

ESEA Creatives is a Scotland-based, community-led network supporting ESEA artists, creatives, and cultural workers. SNACK spoke to Adrian Leung, who runs ESEA Creatives with Abie Sorono and Lok Pui Lo, about the ESEA community and this year’s ESEA Heritage Month programme.

Hope premiered in Competition at Cannes this year, marking director Na Hong-jin’s return to the big screen ten years after The Wailing. It’s not every day that you have the opportunity to see a film at Cannes with an after-credits Easter egg that feels more like a Marvel blockbuster than a social realist film filled with social critique; Fjord, this year’s Palme d’Or winner, is a socially-engaged drama rooted in the kind of realist tradition more commonly associated with the festival’s serious arthouse cinema.

What makes Hope unusual is not simply that it’s an ESEA film competing at Cannes, but that it’s a large-scale genre film seeking to break out in the Western market. Since Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, internationally-recognised ESEA cinema has often found its Western audience through arthouse successes such as Parasite. Films that make huge amounts of money in their domestic markets, such as Ne Zha 2, have usually struggled to replicate that success in the West. Hope, by contrast, arrives in the UK as a large-scale Korean sci-fi action film, with NEON handling its UK and Irish theatrical release directly for the first time.

For those lucky enough to have seen the film at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in August, they will know that Hope is not your usual ESEA story that tries to tell us something important about social structures or history. Instead, it’s driven by pure adrenaline, with the thrill and visceral pleasure of the action accompanied by crumbling architecture, the smell of blood, and a distinctly playful Korean sense of humour. The film’s dynamic camerawork and constant swearing, set against a destroyed town on the outskirts of Korea and its vast surrounding forest, also create a visual metaphor for the place we inhabit.

For an ESEA film that feels so refreshing and comes with such visual spectacle, the preview is also remarkably affordable at £5, including a special survival pack made up of Korean goodies for each attendee.

ESEA Creatives will also host a retrospective screening of Lilting, directed by Hong Khaou and starring Cheng Pei-pei, Ben Whishaw, and Andrew Leung, on 30th September at The Pyramid at Anderston in Glasgow. Lilting was one of the first feature films by an ESEA filmmaker to be supported by British public funding. It’s a film about love, mourning, and ESEA queer immigrant identity within British society. As Adrian puts it, it was shot before Ben Whishaw ‘was a big name.’

They will also host Threads Around the Table, a hands-on evening in Edinburgh on 21st September where attendees will make and share noodles together. ESEA co-director Lok Pui Lo, Xuan Li, and Emily Ya Hsuan Fu will discuss the stories, memories, and cultural heritage connected to these dishes.

Don’t miss the ESEA Creatives meetup at National Theatre Scotland (NTS) on 29th September. Hannah Low, a fellow at NTS, will share findings from her research into ESEA artists and communities in Scotland. 

For Adrian, the story of ESEA Creatives started not with a plan to build an organisation, but with the absence of one. Having lived in London for ten years before moving to Scotland, he saw how organisations such as MilkTea and ESEA Music created opportunities for ESEA creatives to meet one another. When he moved to Edinburgh, he realised that ‘that didn’t really exist here’, despite the presence of a sizeable ESEA community.

Working in film and TV as a composer and inspired by BEAM (British East & South East Asians in Media – a UK network for British East and Southeast Asians in media) founder Christopher Chow, Adrian first organised a meetup for ESEA filmmakers. To attract more ESEA community members, he decided to open the idea up to creatives from different fields. A Lunar New Year meetup in 2025 unexpectedly brought around 50 people to Edinburgh, including people travelling from Glasgow and creatives from different generations and backgrounds.

What made that night different from conventional creative networking, Adrian recalls, was that it was not about ‘What can you do for me?’ Instead, it was about friendship and sharing experiences, both as ESEA people and as freelance creatives. After a suggestion from Uuganaa Ramsay to expand the gathering into a festival to showcase all the ESEA talent in the room, that meetup became the starting point for Liquid Identities. Hosted successfully later that year with funding from Edinburgh Council, the idea grew into a larger platform for showcasing artists and bringing people together, featuring over 30 creatives across different art forms and welcoming more than 200 attendees. The event’s success also led to ESEA Creatives being nominated for the Inclusion Award at the Edinburgh Creative Awards.

That organic growth remains part of how ESEA Creatives operates. Rather than following a fixed programme, the organisation responds to what its community wants and to opportunities that emerge.

But building an ESEA creative community in Scotland also comes with practical challenges. Funding remains largely project-based: Adrian says the organisation does not currently receive support from a private funder, meaning that each new project requires its own funding. This also affects how far the organisation can expand beyond Edinburgh and Glasgow.

‘We would love to go to the other areas outside of the big cities,’ Adrian says. ESEA Creatives hopes to connect with communities in Dundee, Aberdeen, and the Highlands, creating more opportunities for ESEA people and their allies across Scotland to come together.

Audience building is also an important part of ESEA Creatives’ work. Screenings such as Hope offer more than simply watching a film: they create a chance to celebrate ESEA stories together and experience a sense of community in a safe and inclusive space. ‘I’ve been in a big cinema with only ESEA people watching a film together, and I think it’s beautiful.’ ESEA Creatives therefore hopes to encourage more ESEA audiences and allies to come along.

The ambition, however, extends beyond the cities where the organisation is currently most visible. As ESEA Creatives continues to grow project by project, its next question may be how to connect the communities that are already here, but are still scattered across Scotland.

ESEA Creatives’ ESEA Heritage Month programme takes place from 21st till 30th September in Edinburgh and Glasgow.