Is it a documentary? Is it improvised fiction? No, it is both! And it is called Whispers in May, the second feature film from Dongnan Chen (Singing in the Wilderness), which explores the transition from girlhood to womanhood through the eyes of three Chinese girls on a road trip.
One of the three girls is Qihuo, who has a secret, namely that she has just had her first menstruation. That makes her ready for the traditional “Changing Skirt” coming-of-age ceremony. With her migrant worker parents away, she goes on a voyage with her two best friends to buy a skirt. Whispers in May blends documentary with an improvised fictional journey to follow them and take us to the edge of girlhood and womanhood.
Whispers in May will world premiere on Sunday, March 15, in the main competition lineup of CPH:DOX, the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival.
Jia Zhao of Muyi Film produced the hybrid doc with Chen’s Tail Bite Tail Films in co-production with Malin Hüber for Her Film in Sweden and Heejung Oh for Seesaw Pictures in South Korea.
Chen met Qihuo on a trip to Liangshan. “At 14, she was at a point where childhood was starting to slip away,” she recalls. “The world was ready to name her – a woman, wife, and migrant worker – before she could choose her own course.”
That inspired Chen to make Whispers in May. The director talked to THR about the creative process behind the film, its hybrid form, “casting” the girls, and what she will do next.
How did you find or “cast” the girls?
I initially traveled to the Liangshan Mountains for a commission on shorts centered on Nuosu women across generations. During the research, I got the chance to read essays written by local school children, and their voices were staggering. Some imagined a future where they might live and die unnoticed in a dim city basement, while others wildly dreamed of lines of suitors in luxury cars stretching from Liangshan all the way to Paris.
But one line felt like a quiet ache: “I’ve made many wishes, but none has ever come true.” That line belonged to Qihuo. When I met her, it was love at first sight, a feeling that’s hard to explain, but it’s how almost all my films begin. From that first day, Qihuo became a constant presence, calling us to ask where we were or if we’d eaten, eventually just following us around. And she discovered and pulled out my very first white hair!
As we talked more, I got to know she was temporarily in a “homeless” state. Her parents were away as migrant laborers, and the grandfather who had raised her recently passed away. She was drifting between the homes of different relatives, but would often sneak back to her grandfather’s old house. It was in this solitude she carried her menstruation secret. In her community, this triggers the Changing Skirt Ceremony, a rite of passage that signals she is no longer a child of her birth family and can be married off for a large dowry. This became a clock. I felt we were racing against time to do something.
Please tell me about how much mixed film forms: how much did you document in traditional documentary form and how much of the film is improvised or staged fiction?
I think of the film as a dream running parallel to reality. The documentary elements provide the soil: the rugged reality of the Liangshan Mountains, the absence of parents, and the gravity of the Changing Skirt Ceremony. But together with the girls, we grew flowers on that soil.
Qihuo’s deepest wish was to leave home and see the world, so we chose the form of a road trip as an extension of their immediate environment. For the girls, the distinction between fiction and non-fiction doesn’t really make sense. I simply invited them to treat the film as a space where they could be the protagonists and co-creators of their own adventure.
The interesting thing is that once we stop thinking about the boundary between the two, the process becomes beautifully blurry. I can no longer clearly tell which moments were designed and which happened spontaneously. By letting the girls play themselves, I gradually felt we achieved something truer than facts. Ultimately, we all have a story like that, right? One that exists beyond the borders of our daily lives. Or, to look at it another way: we don’t have to just live the lives we are given; we can invent them as we go. I hope this film empowers these girls to realize that they can be the authors of their own adventures, both for this film and for the life beyond.
How did you and your team work with the kids? They have such great energy and charisma, but I assume you needed to collaborate and protect them?
To me, this production was always a playground rather than a set. The very origin of this film was the girls’ own agency to be on the road, so protecting their courage and curiosity was vital not just as an ethical responsibility, but also for the film to even exist.
We didn’t have a script, but we had a shared outline of possibilities at the start. And we watched clips together during the production to spark dialogues about where to go next. This allowed the film to breathe and follow their rhythm, so the filming became something we discovered together.
During this process, the girls truly revealed to me a fierce and quiet resistance of childhood. To see them on the road, moving away from a prescribed fate and toward an unknown horizon, showed cinema in its purest and most original form. It made me think about what we can achieve through the medium of film; it’s so powerful to extend the boundaries of a life. that
We also maintained a transparent dialogue with the parents and the school to build a foundation of formal trust, while holding a private, sacred space for the girls until they were ready to share on their own terms.
I love how we see beautiful nature and how it feels like a contrast to society and its norms and expectations. How important was that for you?
In the wilderness, the landscape echoes the girls’ untamed energy. Nature nourishes them as they grow and is an extension of their inner landscape. It grants them a suspended freedom, where their laughter and sorrows aren’t muffled by noises or expectations. They aren’t subjects of a social category, but simply exist as themselves.
Yet this beauty carries weight. In Liangshan, the mountains are layer upon layer; the very thing that protects their innocence is also what isolates them. The construction scenes throughout the film signal this shifting reality, and the girls often wonder, “What is behind the mountains?” These mountains are more than physical barriers. They also carry the weight of local community norms and the grueling path toward a world they haven’t seen.
Is the myth of Coqotamat, which we hear about in the film, real? Where does it come from?
During filming, the girls would tell stories to each other at night, and Coqotamat was the one they shared most often. They heard about it from their grandparents and are truly terrified by it. It’s an oral tale passed down through generations, and because it’s not a written text, it breathes and changes. I later learned that many communities in Liangshan have different versions, though the core remains the same. It is their shared heritage, but also their shared imagination. So, we decided to embrace this fluidity and created our own version of the myth together.
While Coqotamat is a shape-shifter who wears the faces of a thousand women to lure children away and swallow them whole, the girls are running away from a fate that has been wearing the same face for generations. And in researching the Nuosu folklore [the Nuosu are an ethnic group in southern China], I was struck by how many of them are very similar to Western tales, like the Grimm Brothers’. There must be psychological reasons for this similarity across cultures, as fairy tales serve as a survival manual for little girls by encoding the dangers of the adult world. The Changing Skirt Ceremony is their version of the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood.
Can you tell me how you chose the film’s title?
The film’s titles are different in three languages because the feeling of each language is so unique. The English title originates from the Nuosu title, ꉬꆪꂁꇐ (May, Hidden). We happened to make this film in May. It wasn’t really planned, yet it mirrors the last moments of childhood. And the transition to womanhood isn’t a loud explosion; it’s a quiet, drifting slip just before reality settles in.
My friend Arthur Jones helped with the English translation. After watching the film, he was grabbed by the gentle, small sounds – the wind through the mountain flowers and the girls’ voices. He felt that Whispers of May captured the essence of what was “hidden” but translated it into a sensory experience. For the Mandarin title, we used Spring Reverie (春日幻游).
Will we see more films from you? Do you have any new films in the works?
I’m in early development of a hybrid narrative feature about a woman who tries to preserve her hometown through a camera, only to find that the more she records, the more the real world dissolves into a mosaic of digital fragments.
Drawn from my experience over a decade in filming real people, the project explores the fragility of storytelling in an image-saturated world and the search for a truth that might exist beyond the frame.
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