{"id":346554,"date":"2026-03-14T21:53:10","date_gmt":"2026-03-14T21:53:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/346554\/"},"modified":"2026-03-14T21:53:10","modified_gmt":"2026-03-14T21:53:10","slug":"whispers-in-may-interview-on-improv-doc-film-about-girlhood-cphdox","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/346554\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Whispers in May’ Interview on Improv Doc Film About Girlhood: CPH:DOX"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIs it a documentary? Is it improvised fiction? Well, actually, it is both! And it is called Whispers in May<\/a>, the second feature film from Dongnan\u00a0Chen (Singing in the Wilderness), which explores the transition from girlhood to womanhood through the eyes of three Chinese girls on a road trip.<\/p>\n

\n\tOne of the three girls is Qihuo, who\u00a0has a secret, namely that she has\u00a0just had her first menstruation. That makes her ready for the traditional \u201cChanging Skirt\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhispers in May will world premiere on Sunday, March 15, in the main competition<\/a> lineup of CPH:DOX<\/a>, the\u00a0Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tJia Zhao of Muyi Film produced the hybrid doc with\u00a0Chen\u2019s Tail Bite Tail Films, in co-production with Malin H\u00fcber for Her Film in Sweden and\u00a0Heejung\u00a0Oh for Seesaw Pictures in South Korea.
\u00a0
Chen met Qihuo on a trip to Liangshan. \u201cAt 14, she was at a point where childhood was starting to slip away,\u201d she recalls. \u201cThe world was ready to name her \u2013 a woman, wife, and migrant worker \u2013 before she could choose her own course.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThat inspired Chen to make Whispers in May. The director talked to THR about the creative process behind the film, its hybrid form, \u201ccasting\u201d the girls, and what she will do next.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\u2018Whispers in May\u2019<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of Muyi Film\/Tail Bite Tail Films<\/p>\n

\n\tHow did you find or \u201ccast\u201d the girls?\u00a0<\/p>\n

I initially\u00a0traveled\u00a0to the Liangshan Mountains for a commission on shorts\u00a0centered\u00a0on\u00a0Nuosu\u00a0women 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.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

But one line felt like a quiet ache:\u00a0\u201cI\u2019ve made many wishes, but none has ever come true.\u201d\u00a0That line belonged to\u00a0Qihuo. When I met her, it was love at first sight, a feeling\u00a0that\u2019s\u00a0hard to explain, but\u00a0it\u2019s\u00a0how\u00a0almost all\u00a0my films begin. From that first day,\u00a0Qihuo\u00a0became a constant presence, calling us to ask where we were or if\u00a0we\u2019d\u00a0eaten, eventually just following us around. And she discovered and pulled out my very first white hair!\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

As we talked more, I got to know she was temporarily in a \u201chomeless\u201d state. Her parents were away as migrant\u00a0laborers, and the grandfather who had raised her recently passed away. She was drifting between the homes of different\u00a0relatives, but\u00a0would often sneak back to her grandfather\u2019s 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.\u00a0I felt we\u00a0were racing against time to do something.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tPlease 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?\u00a0
\u00a0
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\u2018Whispers in May\u2019 <\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of Muyi Film\/Tail Bite Tail Films<\/p>\n

\n\tQihuo\u2019s\u00a0deepest 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\u00a0doesn\u2019t\u00a0really 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. <\/p>\n

\n\tThe 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,\u00a0I gradually felt we\u00a0achieved something truer than facts.\u00a0Ultimately, we all\u00a0have a story like that, right? One that exists beyond the borders of our daily lives. Or, to look at it another way: we\u00a0don\u2019t\u00a0have 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.\u00a0
\u00a0
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?\u00a0
\u00a0
To me, this production was always a playground rather than a set. The very origin of this film was the girls\u2019 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.\u00a0\u00a0
\u00a0
We\u00a0didn\u2019t\u00a0have 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. <\/p>\n

\n\tDuring 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\u00a0most original form. It made me think about what we can achieve through the medium of film;\u00a0it\u2019s\u00a0so powerful to extend the boundaries of a life.\u00a0that
\u00a0
We also\u00a0maintained\u00a0a 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.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\u2018Whispers in May\u2019 <\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of Muyi Film\/Tail Bite Tail Films<\/p>\n

\n\tI 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?\u00a0
In the wilderness, the landscape echoes the girls\u2019 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\u00a0aren\u2019t\u00a0muffled by noises or expectations. They\u00a0aren\u2019t\u00a0subjects of a social\u00a0category, but\u00a0simply exist as themselves.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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, \u201cWhat is behind the mountains?\u201d These mountains are more than physical barriers. They also carry the weight of local community norms and the\u00a0grueling\u00a0path toward a world they\u00a0haven\u2019t\u00a0seen.\u00a0
\u00a0
Is the myth of\u00a0Coqotamat, which we hear about in the film, real? Where does it come from?\u00a0
During filming, the girls would tell stories to each other at night, and\u00a0Coqotamat\u00a0was the one they shared most often. They heard about it from their grandparents and are truly terrified by it.\u00a0It\u2019s\u00a0an oral tale passed down through generations, and because\u00a0it\u2019s\u00a0not a written text, it breathes and changes. I later learned that many communities in Liangshan have different versions, though the core\u00a0remains\u00a0the same. It is their shared heritage, but also their shared imagination. So, we decided to embrace this\u00a0fluidity and created our own version of the myth together.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile\u00a0Coqotamat\u00a0is a\u00a0shape-shifter\u00a0who 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\u00a0Nuosu\u00a0folklore [the Nuosu are an\u00a0ethnic group\u00a0in\u00a0southern China], I was struck by how many of them are very\u00a0similar\u00a0to Western tales, like the Grimm Brothers\u2019.\u00a0There 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\u00a0world. The Changing Skirt Ceremony is their version of the wolf in\u00a0Little Red Riding Hood.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\u2018Whispers in May\u2019 <\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of Muyi Film\/Tail Bite Tail Films<\/p>\n

\n\tCan you tell me how you chose the film\u2019s title?
\u00a0
The film\u2019s titles are different in three languages because the feeling of each language is so unique. The English title originates from the\u00a0Nuosu\u00a0title,\u00a0\ua26c\ua1aa\ua081\ua1d0\u00a0(May, Hidden). We happened to make this film in May. It\u00a0wasn\u2019t\u00a0really planned, yet it mirrors the last moments of childhood. And the transition to womanhood\u00a0isn\u2019t\u00a0a loud explosion;\u00a0it\u2019s\u00a0a quiet, drifting slip just before reality settles in.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

My friend Arthur Jones helped with the English translation. After watching the film, he was grabbed by the gentle, small sounds \u2013 the wind through the mountain flowers and the girls\u2019 voices. He felt that Whispers of May captured the essence of what was \u201chidden\u201d but translated it into a sensory experience. For the Mandarin title, we used Spring Reverie (\u6625\u65e5\u5e7b\u6e38).\u00a0\u00a0
\u00a0
Will we see more films from you? Do you have any new films in the works?\u00a0
\u00a0
I\u2019m\u00a0in 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\u00a0real world\u00a0dissolves into a mosaic of digital fragments. <\/p>\n

\n\tDrawn 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Is it a documentary? Is it improvised fiction? Well, actually, it is both! And it is called Whispers…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":346555,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[106705,93,61,1042,60,270],"class_list":["post-346554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-cphdox","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-international","tag-ireland","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346554","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=346554"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346554\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/346555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=346554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=346554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=346554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}