Whispers in May

Fourteen-year-old Qihuo has a secret, she tells her friends: she recently got her first period. This means her family will give her a ceremonial skirt symbolizing the end of her childhood. But Qihuo is living on her own in a remote mountain region of southern China; her mother works in the city as a migrant laborer. In conversations with her friends, they hatch a plan to go with Qihuo far away to the other side of the mountains so she can buy the skirt herself.

On this long journey on foot, which filmmaker Dongnan Chen renders partly through improvised fiction, the girls talk about what the future may hold. On their odyssey toward adulthood, against a backdrop of majestic mountain scenery, they encounter a variety of people along the way and share myths and sinister legends.

Chen heightens the atmosphere of fantasy with animated sequences depicting traditional fables. For as long as they can still be children, the friends hold on to the hope that they can shape their own futures, and the harsh realities of being married off or working in a factory can wait.