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
Community Partner
Jjippupmop Qihuo, Mathxiemop Atnyop, Lhithxamop Itgop, Lhithxamop Itsi
Hong Kong/Netherlands/South Korea/Sweden
2026
In Mandarin with English subtitles
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Indigenous & Community Access
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Credits & Director
Producer
Jia Zhao, Kay Xu
Cinematography
Ming Xue, Xiao Xiao
ANIM
Chenxi Zhang , Lopvup·Ma·Axmuyiggu
Editor
Sisi Chen, Tao Gu
Original Music
Chad Cannon
Dongnan Chen
Dongnan Chen crafts films that turn lived experience into cinematic fables, exploring transitional identities and the inbetween spaces of reality and the imagined. Her works include 14 Paintings (2023), which screened at Sundance, International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, and MOMA’s Doc Fortnight; Singing in the Wilderness (2021), which screened at International Film Fest Rotterdam and New Directors/New Films; the Emmy-nominated Sound of Vision (2012); and The Trail from Xinjiang (2013). Whispers in May, Chen’s second feature, premiered at the 2026 Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival and won the festival’s top prize, the DOX:AWARD.
Filmography: The Trail from Xinjiang (2013); Singing in the Wilderness (2021); 14 Paintings (2023)
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