The director-producer duo Michelle Zhou and Chun Yu collectively incubated “Big Little Things,” a lesbian coming-out story inspired by a real-life family rift during a New Year holiday amid the COVID-19 pandemic in Harbin, a snowy city in northern China. Zhou notes that the film was selected for the Venice Days first but was later invited by the Horizons. Since same-sex relationships have long been a social taboo in China, Yu told her family that Zhou was her friend and colleague.
Nevertheless, Yu’s parents deduced that Zhou was actually Yu’s romantic partner, and the family collapsed overnight. It was totally dark, I couldn’t do anything,” Yu tells Variety. But when conflicts like that occur, most people would choose silence and lies to preserve the harmony,” says Zhou, who observed this turmoil from the sidelines.
And why can honesty feel more dangerous than deception?’” After using the story as a base for a short film of the same name, Zhou expanded it into a feature to illuminate societal and heteronormative pressure through a fictional scenario — a fake boyfriend is introduced to appease the matchmaking-obsessed family, indicating the prevalence of lavender marriages in the Chinese LGBTQ+ community. Zhou’s next feature, “Another Stranger,” is a family comedy-drama based on her experience with her cousin when they were trapped in Thailand during a trip due to the COVID lockdown from January to April 2020. My cousin and I used to be very close when we were little, but during that period, he was not the man I used to know and I was not the woman he used to know.
There was a lot of jealousy, vulnerability, masculinity — all these things mixed together on this tropical island,” Zhou says. A writer-director as well, Yu is working on her debut feature, a Chinese diaspora story set to take place in Los Angeles and a European village. The project is hitting international film markets, seeking American and European producers.
Watch the trailer: https://youtu.be/0v-cCIKet28
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