On March 20, 2026, Dongnan Chen’s second feature film Whispers in May won the DOX: AWARD, the top prize at the 23rd edition of CPH:DOX, Copenhagen’s international documentary festival, becoming the second-ever Chinese filmmaker to win the prize. The film is currently screening at the 2026 Visions du Réel in Switzerland, and will soon appear at the 2026 HotDocs in Canada.

Set in the otherworldly cloud-kissed Liangshan mountains in a remote area of southwest China, the film provides rare access to this rugged highland that remains rather mysterious even to most Chinese people. It’s home to the Nuosu ethnic minority who have traditionally lived in relative isolation. For decades, young Nuosu have left these ancestral lands in droves in search of a better life.

Qihuo, a 14-year-old Nuosu girl, grew up in these mountains. She has eyes that seem to brim with decades of stories, but we meet her just as she has her first period. In Nuosu, once a girl becomes a woman, she should marry, have her own children, and become a migrant worker in the distant economically prosperous regions — just as Qihuo’s mom did. As part of a rite of passage, Qihuo needs to buy an expensive traditional skirt that isn’t easy to come by. She has to go to the market in the distant township of Buxte to get a more affordable one.

This is the setting in which Whispers in May unfolds. It follows Qihuo and her two best friends on a five-day road trip to buy her the skirt.

A Film Built Around A Wish

“I’ve made many wishes, but none have ever come true.”

That single line, written in a school essay, was how Whispers in May began. 

When director Dongnan first traveled to the Liangshan mountains, she wasn’t planning to make a film. But while traveling and exploring, she fell in love with the numinous land. She first got to know a local school and a teacher, and when the teacher showed her some of her students’ writings, Dongnan was grabbed by that line. She asked to meet Qihuo, the girl who wrote it.

On first sight of Qihuo, Dongnan instantly knew she wanted to make a film with her. Dongnan describes the impression as something like a creative crush.

She sat down with Qihuo, notebook in hand. “If we were making a film together,” she told her, “what would you want it to be?” Qihuo’s biggest wish, it turned out, was to go as far from home as possible.

That became the film’s engine — a five-day road trip from Silo township toward Buxte, through landscapes the girls had never crossed. The aim is to realize Qihuo’s dream, but on the other side, at the end of the trip is a skirt awaiting Qihuo to wear for her rite of passage.

The road trip itself becomes a generator for stories. Dongnan describes how the girls directed the cinematographer Xue Ming throughout the trip, like telling Xue what to see, or pointing out what he had missed. “They knew they were co-creating something for the last moments of their childhood memory, so they were improvising with us,” Dongnan recalls.

At times, there was no on-site translation, even when the girls spoke Nuosu, a language Dongnan as a mandarin speaker doesn’t understand. “Language isn’t that important,” she says. “I’m used to not understanding what my characters are saying. You can tell from their expressions and body language what matters and what doesn’t.” This approach also gave her a lot of surprises in post-production. Dongnan enjoyed sitting in the editing room, unearthing new narrative threads in the unguarded conversations between the 14-year-olds.

The girls still haven’t arrived in Buxte as the film nears its end. They encounter heavy rain on the first night, and in daytime they walk under an intense sun without shade. One of the girls leaves half way after her irate mum orders her to come back over the phone. Qihuo and the other friend almost give up, until a passing car lets them hitchhike closer to Buxte.

However, soon after, they spot a hillside blanketed in soma (azalea in Nuosu language). The puffy pink flowers are the most sacred flower of the Nuosu people, which blooms in late spring and is celebrated as a symbol of womanhood, beauty, power and hope. The girls had never seen the soma for themselves, and couldn’t pass the opportunity to get close.

They jump off the car, and run toward the flowers. Buxte, skirts, rites of passage, are all forgotten in the pure joy of a childhood dream.

The Monster with a Thousand Women’s Faces

One night, the girls started telling a story.

Dongnan didn’t understand at first. But she could see that they were genuinely afraid. They huddled together and took turns playing two roles: a little girl trying to escape, and a shape-shifting ogress who wore a different woman’s face each time she appeared. 

This is coqotamat, a Nuosu oral folk tale about a demon who can take on a thousand women’s faces, and who preys specifically on young children and girls. Children across the Liangshan mountains grow up with it.

The Nuosu, with over 2 million population, have an independently developed writing system. Yet coqotamat does not get transmitted in books. It had been passed from mouth to mouth, child to child, generation to generation. “Everyone tells it a little differently. Each person adds their own imagination.” Dongnan spent quite some time asking around, piecing together what it was. She started realizing how important this story can be in shaping the film’s narrative.

“At first, I simply included the footage of the girls telling this story at night. But later on, I decided that it deserves a much more crucial place in the film.” This change of mind happened when Dongnan was amazed by how closely coqotamat resembled some Western lore — the same logic of encoding adult danger in a child’s story. The gingerbread house. The wolf in grandmother’s clothing. The beautiful stranger who is not what she seems. “These stories exist everywhere,” she says. “Because the world they’re warning children about exists everywhere.”

Coqotamat especially resonates with Qihuo’s situation on the cusp of womanhood. The ogress wears many women’s faces, and each one a version of the life she might be made to inhabit: wife, mother, laborer, someone else’s auntie. That’s why the film makes a parallel between the tale and the girls’ story.” I felt it opened another space in the film’s universe,” Dongnan says. “It made these girls’ lives feel less isolated. Across history, across different places, other small lives have resonated with theirs.”

The world of coqotamat the girls are running away from, is somehow the destination of their journey. That echos with the finale of the girls jumping off the car.

Action

Dongnan Chen graduated from NYU’s documentary program and made her name with Singing in the Wilderness (2021), a feature that followed a Miao ethnic Christian choir from a remote mountain village in southwest China, who were discovered and became a national sensation. That film, observational and quietly powerful, is her first feature-length project.

14 Paintings (2023), her Sundance-selected short showing fourteen original paintings from China’s Dafen, an urban village in Shenzhen where countless reproductions of Western masterpieces were once exported, marked a turn toward something more formally adventurous: staged, performed, no longer content to simply observe.

Whispers in May moves further still. Dongnan resists categorizing it. “Once you’re sitting with a 14-year-old girl and trying to explain the difference between documentary and fiction,” she says, “you realize those concepts have no meaning.” The categories dissolve not as an aesthetic position but as a practical reality. Since the girls don’t know the difference, neither does the film.

The change is also ethical. “With observational filmmaking,” Dongnan says, “I felt very passive as an author. I kept entering people’s lives for years, took something every time, and one day I just left.” She felt the discomfort of extended intimacy with no clear return. Whispers in May was, in her words, an “action”: she wasn’t just documenting the girls’ lives, but creating something inside them.

The girls are now 18. They left Liangshan not long after the filming was done. Now they all work in factories, moving between provinces the way all migrant workers do, never settling. When Dongnan showed them the finished film, they watched quietly for a long time. Then they said: We feel old now.

“Childhood had actually ended, right there in that film.” Dongnan quietly says.

She has no fixed plans for what comes next. But she knows what she wants. “I hope that one day,” she says, “all the people I’ve filmed can appear again in a different form.” Whether that happens depends on chance, like a field of flowers appearing through a car window.