Ennui is a feeling that can envelop anyone, however creative they are. “Every day I wake up I think to myself, ‘My life is so plain and joyless,’” says Hong Kong filmmaker Jun Li Jun-shuo. “I mean, people of my age, they do a lot of different stuff. They do pottery. They take up new hobbies. They go hiking. They have this wonderful life on their social media. And every day I wake up … I don’t know what I should do today.” If this sounds like he is bemoaning his lot, he is not. When we meet for this interview, the 33-year-old writer-director is sitting in the famed Palast at the Berlin International Film Festival, dressed snappily in a light pink jumper. His third movie, the black-and-white miniature piece Queerpanorama, has just been unveiled, and the buzz about it is already building; trade paper Variety called the film “sexy” after its explicit trailer was released ahead of the festival. The film concerns an unnamed young man from Hong Kong, played by Jayden Cheung Dik-man, who has one-off sexual encounters with male foreigners; he does not discriminate – Welsh, Thai, and German men are among his hookups. It is an idea that came from Li’s own life. “Because I am a gay director in Hong Kong … [when] I am on the hookup apps, the locals would know that I’m a director,” he explains. “So to have simply casual sex … that is why I tend to meet foreigners.” It is a very niche film, so I can do what I want Jun Li, who self-financed Queerpanorama With the film a series of episodic encounters, the protagonist adopts the name and biographical traits of his previous lover when he meets someone new. Li related intimately to this idea, admitting he often uses fake names with new lovers, again to help preserve anonymity. “I don’t intend to lie to them for the whole lifetime [like my character does]. I just randomly give names. I mean, I introduce myself as something else. I don’t always take the name from the previous encounter, but I make up names.” While the film isn’t strictly autobiographical, it is clear Li drew heavily from his own experiences. At one point, Cheung’s character meets a scientist from Iran. “I meet a lot of scientists,” says Li, who was educated at Cambridge University in the UK, where he gained a Master of Philosophy in gender studies. So why does his protagonist borrow others’ names and professions? Is he simply uncertain of his own existence? When the character explains that all he enjoys is “movies and sex”, it feels close to Li’s own personality. “That is basically my life, because I don’t have anything else in my life,” Li says. “But I do work so hard on film. I spend all my time writing.” He adds: “In films, a lot of the times you don’t know what you’re working at or for. A lot of the energy … you just do it, and then you waste it, and then you don’t know what you get from it, because the chance is slim. “Even though I have made three films, I also have a lot of ideas that felt very exciting, but are never realised. So it happens to all creatives.” Li, who did not attend film school, dropped out of an architecture course at the University of Hong Kong, before later attending the Chinese University of Hong Kong to study journalism and communications. A brief stint as a television reporter followed, but he quit and re-entered academia, heading to Cambridge. He finally found his calling making films. His debut, the transgender drama Tracey, arrived in 2018, before his 2021 sophomore feature Drifting, a drama about homelessness, won the best adapted screenplay prize at the Golden Horse Awards in Taiwan. If the title of his second film seems to sum up Li’s early years, there is no doubting the quality of his movies. Shot in black and white, Queerpanorama – the Chinese title translates as “Portrait of Everyone” – has an easy-going, conversational quality that feels like that of an American indie film from the 1980s. “There’s no particular author or particular era that we want to pay tribute to,” he promises, but it is hard not to think of a film like Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise when watching Queerpanorama. While the script contains nods to Wong Kar-wai – whose own 1997 gay drama Happy Together also leaps to mind – Li tells me his biggest influence is fellow Hong Kong director Stanley Kwan Kam-pang. Queerpanorama is a daring work that does not flinch when it comes to the content, so much so that Li self-financed the production, spending HK$60,000 (US$7,700) of his own money to get the project off the ground. This was always likely to be the case, given the film’s graphic sex scenes were off-putting for financiers. But you sense that Li prefers it this way, keeping full control over the project. “It is a very niche film,” he says, “so I can do what I want.” Given the sexual content, does Li hope the film will get a release in Hong Kong? “Technically, it could. I mean, I still want to try. Because, I mean, technically, as long as we don’t see an erect penis, it should be all right. But you never know.” With minimal plot – it is more excerpts from the life of its sexually promiscuous protagonist – I ask whether he feels Queerpanorama is his most experimental film? “Yes, yes, and it is also the most fulfilling,” he replies. The movie was shot in 10 days, with a further three added to capture shots of Cheung riding around the city. “It is not that unusual in Hong Kong, because first-time film directors mostly do everything in less than 20 days,” he shrugs. However breakneck the shoot, the results are impressive, and likely to cause a stir with rising star Cheung in the lead. He was first cast by Li in an early short film, the young actor answering a Facebook post and auditioning when he was 15 and still in high school. Seven years on, with Cheung now better known after featuring in ViuTV thriller series Left on Read, they reunited for Queerpanorama – but this was not always on the cards. “I didn’t imagine him playing this character, to be honest. And he knows that too,” says Li. “In the beginning, I looked for someone a little older, and he knew about this project. He knew that I was casting people, and he said he would like to try. “When we did this film, he had just graduated from university … and he has really changed. He has become an adult. I didn’t think about him when I was writing this script, but then he came here to audition. There is a feeling of certainty, of feeling safe with him.” All of a sudden, that ennui seems far away. Want more articles like this? Follow SCMP Film on Facebook