Chinese expat artist Viv Li ends up in Berlin during the pandemic. Her inquisitive attempts to enter the city’s queer subculture sound different when she tries to tell her Maoist-influenced relatives in Beijing about her experiences – the film smoothly navigates between cultures, in search of where the boundaries of adaptability lie and where individual identity starts. Yet Li is never interested in playing one world off against the other, choosing instead to approach both of them with frankness and a healthy dose of humour and playfulness. She places songs by Trio and Juliane Werding over impressions of Chinese sights, stages the escape from Beijing’s tightly-knit surveillance network as a virtuoso gangster ballet and has Mao rise up from behind a mountain range to ask with fatherly concern: “Are you okay?”

Felix Mende