“I’ve made many wishes, but none have ever come true.” That line, written by a teenage girl in China’s remote Liangshan region, became the starting point for “Whispers in May,” the hybrid documentary by Emmy-nominated Chinese director Dongnan Chen (“14 Paintings,” “Singing in the Wilderness,” “Sound of Vision”), which will world premiere in the main competition at the Copenhagen Intl. Documentary Film Festival, also known as CPH:DOX.
The doc – which Chen describes as a “reluctant coming-of-age film” – follows Qihuo, a 14-year-old girl who has just had her first menstruation, on a road trip with two close friends. Their goal is to buy Qihuo a skirt for the traditional “Changing skirt” ceremony, a rite of passage marking the transition to womanhood for Nuosu women in that part of China.
Many children there grow up largely without their parents, who leave to find work in distant cities. During the week, they typically live at school while extended family members or teachers fill the gap left by migrant labor. For girls like Qihuo, adolescence also brings the pressure of long-standing traditions, including the possibility of arranged marriages.
“That ceremony basically means this girl is no longer part of her birth family. And even though it’s illegal in China, it means they can be married by their parents, who would then get a big sum of dowry money,” Chen explained.
She had initially traveled to the region without plans to shoot a film, until a teacher showed her some of her students’ assignments for their Mandarin class. While some imagined they would end up living in dim basements in big cities and die unnoticed, others dreamt of being pursued by suitors in luxury cars chasing after them, all the way from Liangshan to Paris. But it was when she read the sentence written by Qihuo that Chen was hooked, immediately drawn into the teenager’s world and imagination.
Shot over roughly a month in the spring of 2022, “Whispers in May” was made without a traditional script, though Chen approached the production with a clear conceptual framework: the girls’ journey itself would shape the film.
“It’s a very simple but, to me, very powerful concept: we’re doing a road trip with the girls,” Chen said. “There’s a lot of spontaneity, but also a lot of preparation.”
The film unfolds through poetic and carefully composed images of the girls journeying through the mountainous landscape – an environment that reflects the girls’ inner world, according to Chen, capturing that fragile moment before childhood gives way to adulthood.
“The mountains echo their energy – this untamed energy, away from social norms and expectations, away from the noise of the community,” she said.
But the landscape also carries a more complex meaning.
“It’s also not just about beauty. Those mountains also carry weight. They protect their innocence, but they isolate them, too. The mountains carry the tradition and the norms of the local community, and that makes it a very difficult path for them to walk into the outside world.”
The director made a deliberate aesthetic choice to distance herself from the raw visual style associated with earlier waves of Chinese independent documentary. For Chen, beauty becomes a way of resisting reductive portrayals of communities defined by poverty.
“I always think beauty is simple, but super important,” she said. “In the ’90s and early 2000s, a lot of Chinese independent documentaries liked to use very rough images.
“It’s a political stance to be away from the mainstream – it’s an attitude,” she continued.
“I mostly film people who live on the margins of society, and I feel the image is very important to make them grand and to give people grace. It’s a way to resist. I don’t want them to look small – I don’t want the place to be labeled as poor by showing rough images.”
Beyond its specific setting, Chen says her film ultimately reflects a universal experience.
“The intention is about meeting this girl at this very special moment between girlhood and womanhood. It’s a very universal experience – the vanishing of childhood,” she said.
The film also contributed to a broader reflection on the relationship between filmmaker and subject.
Chen told Variety she is currently in early development on a new project examining the complex intimacy between observer and observed in a hybrid film that will mix reality and fiction.
“Whispers in May” is produced by Jia Zhao and Kay Xu through Muyi Film and Tail Bite Tail Films. The film was a Rough Cuts project at CPH:DOX in 2025 and received support from the IDFA Bertha Fund, the Netherlands Film Fund, the Swedish Film Institute and Field of Vision, among others.
“Whispers in May” will have its world premiere in the main competition at CPH:DOX on March 15. The festival runs in Copenhagen until March 22.
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