Whispers in May 春日幻游 Insights
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About
In the remote Liangshan Mountains, 14-year-old Qihuo has crossed a threshold she is not ready to name. Her parents are away, employed as migrant workers, and her grandfather has died, leaving the duties of home to close in around her. In Whispers in May, filmmaker Dongnan Chen follows Qihuo and her two closest friends, Atnyop and Itgop, as they search for the traditional skirt that marks Qihuo’s passage toward womanhood.
Chen, an Emmy-nominated filmmaker and a Sundance Story and Edit Lab fellow, constructs her film with the girls rather than around them. The hybrid documentary unfolds like a half-remembered tale, as close observations and scenes documenting the girls’ search are interrupted by animated fragments of Yi oral myth. Winner of the prestigious DOX:AWARD at CPH:DOX, Whispers in May is a hypnotic coming-of-age film about girlhood under pressure, where beauty is not an escape from reality but a way to give its young protagonists the scale they deserve.
Content Considerations: Parental abandonment and neglect, mentions of child marriage and forced labor, gender or sexual discrimination
DOX:AWARD, CPH:DOX 2026
Media Partner
Chen, an Emmy-nominated filmmaker and a Sundance Story and Edit Lab fellow, constructs her film with the girls rather than around them. The hybrid documentary unfolds like a half-remembered tale, as close observations and scenes documenting the girls’ search are interrupted by animated fragments of Yi oral myth. Winner of the prestigious DOX:AWARD at CPH:DOX, Whispers in May is a hypnotic coming-of-age film about girlhood under pressure, where beauty is not an escape from reality but a way to give its young protagonists the scale they deserve.
Content Considerations: Parental abandonment and neglect, mentions of child marriage and forced labor, gender or sexual discrimination
DOX:AWARD, CPH:DOX 2026
Media Partner
