At Milan’s Palazzo Citterio, three Chinese short films explore female identity, bodily autonomy and the complicated relationship between memory and desire.
Who has the right to tell women’s stories, and who gets to interpret them? Building on the conversations initiated by FIRST FRAME, the FIRST International Film Festival’s programme dedicated to women’s cinema, Flower on the Rock: Celebrating Female Narratives on Screen brought three Chinese short films to Palazzo Citterio in Milan on 25 September.
Presented in collaboration with GIADA, the screening continued the festival’s exploration of female experiences and their representation on screen, while raising questions about the legitimacy of storytelling and the ownership of women’s narratives.
The three films, each distinct in style and subject matter, approach these questions through different cinematic languages: an exuberant encounter between tradition and modernity, a surreal examination of the mother-daughter relationship, and a melancholic urban romance shaped by memory and desire.
Du Yating’s Erhong’s Overture is a poetic yet dramatically charged story following its protagonist, Erhong, a young woman from the Lahu ethnic community in southwestern China, over the three days preceding her wedding.
The film opens with images of lush natural landscapes and traditional hunting culture, initially inviting the audience to imagine a remote village seemingly untouched by modernity. Erhong takes a bow, an object that will become central to her journey of self-discovery. Yet this impression of a world suspended in time is soon disrupted when she unexpectedly stumbles upon a music festival in the forest.
There, she encounters a young man whose performance combines sign language with popping, a style of street dance that finds an unexpectedly beautiful correspondence with Erhong’s traditional movements. The scene creates a fascinating dialogue between two different vocabularies of bodily expression: one rooted in inherited cultural practices, the other in a contemporary form imported from elsewhere. Despite their contrasting origins, both rely on the body as a means of communication beyond spoken language.
The juxtaposition becomes particularly striking in this energetic dance sequence, which briefly allows Erhong to inhabit a space outside the expectations imposed upon her.
Later, the film moves into a dreamlike ritual in which Erhong reunites with her grandmother, a former hunter. Their encounter culminates in another dance, one that seems to defy definition and, more importantly, the predetermined path of marriage and domestic obligation.
Once again, movement becomes the film’s most eloquent form of expression. Dance is no longer simply a cultural performance but a gesture of resistance, passed down through generations of women who have found ways, however quiet or fleeting, to challenge the roles prescribed to them.
The recurring imagery of hunting, ritual and dance gradually converges, giving the film a satisfying thematic coherence within its approximately 20-minute running time.
Du, whose background lies in documentary filmmaking, draws inspiration from her research into local hunting traditions as well as her personal family history: her grandfather was himself a hunter. These documentary and autobiographical influences are woven into her second short film, which premiered at FIRST Fantastic.
The result is a work that moves confidently between ethnographic observation, poetic imagery and fantasy. Chen Shuchang, who plays Erhong, delivers a compelling central performance, bringing both vulnerability and determination to a character whose journey is as much about discovering her own body and agency as it is about escaping a prescribed future.
While Erhong’s Overture looks towards cultural inheritance and female emancipation, Yang Yudan’s Her Knots turns its attention to the intimate, often suffocating relationship between a mother and daughter.
Sharing thematic concerns with Confessions of a Mole, a documentary featured in this year’s FIRST FRAME selection, the film examines how women confront medical diagnoses, negotiate their relationships with their bodies, and seek reconciliation within the family.
Both mother and daughter are diagnosed with breast nodules and embark on an increasingly determined effort to improve their health. Yet their attempts to manage the condition are complicated by misunderstandings, conflicting expectations and a series of absurd situations.
What begins as a shared struggle against a medical problem gradually reveals the emotional knots binding the two women together. Their efforts to care for one another frequently become expressions of frustration and control, even as both struggle, sometimes almost desperately, to understand the other’s perspective.
The film’s most memorable image arrives towards its climax. As mother and daughter lie side by side on hospital beds, branches and leaves begin to sprout from their bodies, eventually intertwining into a single flourishing tree.
It is a wonderfully imaginative visual metaphor for their relationship: two individuals whose lives have grown so closely together that affection and dependence have become almost impossible to separate. The image also suggests the possibility of growth, provided they can learn to communicate without trying to reshape one another.
Yang, who studied at the University of Edinburgh and FAMU, approaches this recognisably contemporary subject through an unexpectedly whimsical fantasy. Rather than diminishing the seriousness of the women’s anxieties, the surreal elements lend the film a welcome lightness and make its emotional conflicts more accessible.
The performances of Zheng Hehuizi and She Aier are equally persuasive. They convincingly capture the contradictions of a mother-daughter relationship in which the impulse to protect can become overbearing, and affection often finds its most uncomfortable expression through criticism or interference.
The final film, Talk to Me Like Lovers Do, directed by Oates Yinchao, takes a more restrained approach to fantasy, presenting an urban romance suspended somewhere between memory, longing and reality.
Wu Ting, a 40-year-old woman, lost her first love in an accident more than a decade earlier. One day, she encounters a young man in his twenties who bears an uncanny resemblance to the lover she remembers.
Driven by curiosity and an attraction she can neither fully explain nor resist, Wu Ting begins discreetly following him through the city. What unfolds is less a conventional romantic narrative than an emotional journey through the unresolved desires and losses of her own past.
There is considerable tenderness in the film’s imagery, but its greatest strength lies in the restraint with which Yinchao approaches the material. Rather than spelling out the significance of every encounter, the director leaves room for emotions to accumulate and for audiences to construct their own interpretations.
Is the young man entirely real, or does he exist, at least in part, as a projection of Wu Ting’s memories and unfulfilled desires? The film wisely resists offering a definitive answer.
Its portrayal of the city is equally evocative. Humid, hazy and softly illuminated, the urban landscape becomes a place of fleeting encounters and ambiguous possibilities. At night, familiar streets seem capable of accommodating impossible reunions and second chances, only for daylight to threaten the fragile illusions that darkness has allowed to flourish.
It is a delicate exploration of love and loss, one that understands how the past can continue to shape a person’s emotional life long after the original relationship has disappeared.
Taken together, these three short films offer a compelling glimpse into the range of voices and visual approaches emerging from FIRST’s support of young Chinese filmmakers. Their subjects may differ considerably, yet all three are concerned with the tension between the identities women inherit, the expectations imposed upon them and the desires they struggle to articulate for themselves.
In Erhong’s Overture, resistance finds expression through dance; in Her Knots, the female body becomes a site of anxiety, conflict and eventual reconciliation; while in Talk to Me Like Lovers Do, the imagination opens a space in which a woman can revisit, question and perhaps finally come to terms with her own desires.
Against the backdrop of a Milanese evening, the screening offered more than a showcase of emerging Chinese filmmaking talent. It created an opportunity for stories shaped by particular cultural experiences to speak to an international audience through emotions that transcend geographical boundaries.
What emerges is not a single definition of female experience, but something far more valuable: three distinct cinematic perspectives on women’s attempts to reclaim their bodies, memories and futures.
And perhaps that is where the programme finds its most convincing answer to its opening question. The significance of women’s stories lies not in prescribing who may tell them, but in allowing their complexity, contradictions and individuality to remain visible on screen.
