‘Whispers in May’ Director on Her Coming-of-Age Documentary

“I’ve made many wishes, but none have ever come true.” That line, written by a teenage lady in China’s distant Liangshan area, turned the beginning 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 is able to world premiere in the main competitors at the Copenhagen Intl. Documentary Film Festival, also often known as CPH:DOX.

The doc – which Chen describes as a “reluctant coming-of-age film” – follows Qihuo, a 14-year-old lady who has just had her first menstruation, on a highway journey with two shut pals. Their purpose is to purchase Qihuo a skirt for the conventional “Changing skirt” ceremony, a ceremony of passage marking the transition to womanhood for Nuosu women in that a part of China.

Many kids there develop up largely without their mother and father, who go away to seek out work in distant cities. During the week, they sometimes live in school while prolonged members of the family or academics fill the hole left by migrant labor. For ladies like Qihuo, adolescence also brings the strain of long-standing traditions, including the chance of organized 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 area without plans to shoot a movie, until a instructor confirmed her some of her college students’ assignments for his or her Mandarin class. While some imagined they’d end up dwelling in dim basements in big cities and die unnoticed, others dreamt of being pursued by suitors in luxurious automobiles chasing after them, all the approach from Liangshan to Paris. But it was when she read the sentence written by Qihuo that Chen was hooked, instantly drawn into the teenager’s world and creativeness.

Shot over roughly a month in the spring of 2022, “Whispers in May” was made without a standard script, though Chen approached the manufacturing with a clear conceptual framework: the ladies’ journey itself would form the movie.

“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 movie unfolds via poetic and punctiliously composed photos of the ladies journeying via the mountainous panorama – an surroundings that displays the ladies’ internal world, according to Chen, capturing that fragile second before childhood offers method to maturity.

“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 panorama also carries a more advanced which means.

“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 option to distance herself from the uncooked visible model related to earlier waves of Chinese impartial documentary. For Chen, magnificence turns into a approach of resisting reductive portrayals of communities outlined by poverty.

“I always think beauty is simple, but super important,” she said. “In the ’90s and early 2000s, a whole lot of Chinese impartial documentaries favored to make use of very tough photos.

“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 particular setting, Chen says her movie finally displays a common 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 movie also contributed to a broader reflection on the relationship between filmmaker and topic.

Chen told Variety she is presently in early development on a new project analyzing the advanced intimacy between observer and noticed in a hybrid movie that will combine actuality and fiction.

“Whispers in May” is produced by Jia Zhao and Kay Xu via Muyi Film and Tail Bite Tail Films. The movie was a Rough Cuts project at CPH:DOX in 2025 and acquired help from the IDFA Bertha Fund, the Netherlands Film Fund, the Swedish Film Institute and Field of Vision, among others.

“Whispers in May” may have its world premiere in the main competitors at CPH:DOX on March 15. The pageant runs in Copenhagen until March 22.