China’s ‘Big Little Things’ Turns Real Life Into Coming-Out Drama

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…