Chestnuts

Outside the community café in East London, two queer westerners return for an ex-lover’s heterosexual wedding. Instead of closure, history arrives. John Rabe, remembered in China as “the Good Nazi”, interrupts their present. Moving between London and Shanghai, past and memory, Chestnuts explores how inherited histories shape intimate lives. How can one person be remembered as both hero and perpetrator? What happens when love, migration and national identity collide? Blending humour, hallucination and historical testimony, this cross-cultural drama asks what we carry from the past – and who we become because of it.