Just a few weeks ago, her gentle feature film debut, meandering between cinéma vérité and rural fairytale, won Dongnan Chen the main prize at Copenhagen's renowned CPH:DOX film festival. Now the Chinese filmmaker continues her successful festival journey at Visions du Réel where her imaginative coping-of-age story about three young girls from the Yi minority screens in the Grand Angle section. On the festivals's busy main site, Dongnan Chen spoke with Lidanoir about the delicate balance between friction and reality in Whispers in May, finding the local girls who star in it, and her personal connection to its central themes of migration, social pressure, and generational responsibilities.