Elegy for the Lost

The film unfolds a young Chinese migrant’s poignant recollection of her love story within an underground troupe against the shifting landscape of Chinese urban queer allies and activism. In her voice-over narration, she reflects on the intimacy, struggles, and sacrifices once shared with a lost lover. As her private memories intertwine with public narratives of resistance, both she and her community navigate secrecy, repression, survival, looming precarity, and displacement under societal pressures, while confronting the personal cost of existing in a world that demands their silence. By its kaleidoscopic assemblages of dramatic re-enactments, interviews, found footage, news archives and psychoanalytically informed representations of consciousness, the film takes an essayistic, and "queering", approach to sexual identity, power, governmentality in contemporary China, where the ongoing ideological tensions between socialism and neoliberalism shape both public culture and private life.