‘Whispers In May’ review: Lyrical, warm Chinese debut is poignant blend of documentary and fiction

Dir: Dongnan Chen. Hong Kong/Netherlands/Sweden/South Korea. 2026. 94min

The heart of this affecting hybrid picture is a journey: three teenage girls set out on foot from their remote village in the Liangshan Mountains, in the south of China’s Sichuan province. They hope to buy a skirt for 14-year-old Qihuo, who recently started to menstruate and, according to tradition, must undertake a ceremonial rite-of-passage to mark her entry into adulthood. But the skirt itself is not really the point of this warm, delicate blend of documentary and improvised drama. Rather, this lyrical and rather lovely picture is an account of a precarious, precious moment: the final grasp on a childhood which is poised on the very brink of the adult world.

Magic and folklore are recurring motifs

This is the second feature-length film from Dongnan Chen, whose previous work includes the short film 14 Paintings (2023), which showed in Sundance and IDFA, and the feature documentary Singing In The Wilderness (2021), which screened at Thessaloniki and Rotterdam among others. Whispers is an appealing film which gets much of its charm from the easy, unforced camaraderie between the three schoolfriends (and, to a lesser extent, the much younger sister of one of them, who tags along for the adventure).

With its blend of intimate, observational style and a constructed narrative, the film has a kinship with the work of Honeyland director Tamara Kotevska. There’s a further parallel with Kotevska’s most recent picture, The Tale Of Silyan, in that both weave a traditional mythic folk story through the fabric of the film, to allegorical effect. Like Kotevska’s work, this gentle, meandering gem should be warmly received on the festival circuit following its debut in CPH:DOX competition, but elsewhere may find itself overshadowed by louder, more emphatically issue-led pictures.

Chen doesn’t romanticise the lives of her three main protagonists. We first encounter Qihuo on her own in a squalid single-room shack, cooking maize on an open fire. Her parents are migrant workers; her main connection with them is through hectoring phone calls from her mother. Her grandfather recently passed away, but Qihuo finds a sanctuary in the solitude of the now-empty family home. It’s an escape from the strict routines of the residential school that she attends with her friends, Atnyop and Itgop, and from the responsibilities placed on her by her mother. She is expected to care for her younger siblings, excel at school and, failing that, sign up for factory work and start earning.

The fractures in the relationship between Qihou and her mother are amplified by the distance between them. So when Qihou gets her period, she tells her friends rather than her mother. There is a bit of spirited ribbing initially, before the girls gamely take on the responsibility of preparing for the ’Changing Skirt’ ceremony. But since the highly ornamental garments are expensive, they decide to walk to a neighbouring town to take advantage of a discounted wholesale outlet. It becomes clear, as the first day of trudging draws to a close, that their destination is several days’ slog on foot over monsoon-lashed mountain roads

The road movie structure is somewhat episodic, with some chapters in the journey offering little to our understanding of the girls’ lives, and others feeling forced. But there are moments which work beautifully. Magic and folklore are recurring motifs, both in the line-drawn animated segments that tell the story of a mother who abandons her daughters to a child-eating monster, and in meetings with fortune tellers and an elderly livestock herder who speaks of the monsters that live in the mountains.

The score, a twinkling, shimmering backdrop of chimes that sounds as though it was played on icicles, complements the mystical qualities of the journey, and the sense of wonder that the girls bring to their voyage into the unknown world beyond the mountain, and beyond childhood.