Two Mountains Weighing Down My Chest – Films

Viv Li
Germany, Netherlands | 2026 | 85 min
International Premiere
Languages : English, Chinese, German
Subtitles : English, French

Viv, a thirty-something artist from Beijing, has recently become involved in the Berlin queer scene. Straddling Germany and China, where her family wonders if their daughter has gone mad, the filmmaker tries to understand the environment in which she is living and the one from which she hails. She then constructs a hilarious comedy about her identity, at the intersection of worlds that appear diametrically opposed.

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
A Soil A Culture A River A People, 2025
Across the Waters, 2025
I Don't Feel At Home Anywhere Anymore, 2020

Screenings and tickets

Saturday 18 April 2026 15:45

Grande Salle, Nyon

In the presence of the director

Thursday 23 April 2026 11:15

Grande Salle, Nyon

Themed walks

Filmmakers or researchers from UNIL will take you on a walk through the streets of Nyon to delve into and deepen your appreciation of this film’s subject. Two Mountains Weighing Down My Chest: Balade avec l’association Voqueer