Two Mountains Weighing Down My Chest

Viv, a Beijing-born artist in her thirties stranded in Berlin after Covid, starts to drift into the city’s buzzing queer scene. When someone asks for her pronouns, she begins to question her gender identity. When the time comes to return to China, Viv finds herself confronted with a family struggling to understand their slightly eccentric daughter, in a country still deeply marked by the precepts of the Great Helmsman, Mao Zedong. Through improbable back-and-forths between queer rituals in Berlin, family gatherings in Beijing and drunken nights on a sofa in New York, the filmmaker takes us on a search for self at the limits of the absurd, between worlds that seem to oppose each other in every way and to which she must constantly adapt. How do you construct yourself when you’ve never felt seen as an “insider”? Two Mountains Weighing Down My Chest confirms filmmaker Viv Li’s talent for comedy and self-staging, as well as her sharp depiction of the immense contrasts that make up our world – in which, in the end, we are all in the same boat.

Aurélien Marsais

Two Mountains Weighing Down My Chest, 2026
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