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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. “We had to turn down the Venice Days even though we really love [ANAC and 100autori, the groups behind the section],” says Zhou. “It was a happy dilemma.”
The film’s story stemmed from Zhou and Yu’s real-life family conflict, tracing back to four and a half years ago when they started dating.
“During that time, [Yu] really wanted to share our happiness with her parents, and at the same time, she was terrified of losing them,” Zhou says. 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.
“I was in deep family chaos. It was totally dark, I couldn’t do anything,” Yu tells Variety. “It was a difficult time not just for me, but also my parents because they had to learn about this new thing.”
“I came from Harbin, and in our northeast Chinese culture, we say love and family expectations are inseparable. 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. “That experience made me think, ‘Why do we have to lie to be close with the people we love? 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.
“When we walk our dogs in the [neighborhood], gay people who knew us as lesbian would ask us if we could fake marry each other,” says Yu. “A lot of people are 100% sure that no matter what they tell their families, they will never accept that.”
While addressing minority stress within the family, the film coincidentally summoned unexpected support — the father’s role was played by its real-life inspiration, Yu’s father, Hai.
“My dad was in my [short] film before, so I know he could act,” says Yu. “I said, ‘We are looking for the father role, do you want to come?’ My father said, ‘If you can’t find someone else, you can come to ask me.’ And I said, ‘This is the moment I’m asking you: I need your help.’ A week later, he arrived in Harbin for the table read.”
As Hai opened his heart on set while filming the emotional father-daughter confession scene, the profound pain was soothed. “He turned his back to everyone and sobbed, and said: ‘You don’t understand the feeling of a father losing his daughter,’” Yu confides. “He told me that he [took] the role because he wanted to rescue himself, and express everything he had not said in real life.”
The director-producer duo will continue to collaborate on future projects. 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.
“I was trying to understand our family from a different perspective. 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
English (US) ·