A queer filmmaker in Switzerland captures the divide on her visit home to China

Mother-daughter relationships: the taboo surrounding homosexuality is compounded by the strength of traditional family structures, which remain deeply entrenched in Chinese society. Yue Ran

In her short film My Dear Dear Home, shown recently at the Cinéma du Réel festival in Paris, Yue Ran explores her complicated relationship with her mother – in the context of family tensions over Ran’s sexuality and China’s recent property crisis.

The 48th Cinéma du Réel documentary-film festival in Paris featured impressive debut shorts in its First Window programme for young filmmakers. The originality, structure, and power of some of these films were worthy of the main competition. This was particularly true of the Swiss-Chinese short My Dear Dear Home. Swissinfo met with its director, Yue Ran, in Paris the day after the film’s second screening.

Ran was born in China and filmed her documentary in Sichuan province but she has lived in several countries. She studied literature in Japan and film in Milan, Italy. It was in Japan that she met her Swiss partner, with whom she lived in Paris for two years before they moved to Zurich.

“She wanted to return home,” Ran explains over coffee. “France has too many strikes for her!” she adds with a laugh, “[and] Switzerland is a safe country, with jobs. The countryside is beautiful.”

The two women were married several years ago in Switzerland, and Ran is currently a freelance film editor.

My Dear Dear Home was shot in 2024 as China was emerging from the Covid-19 lockdowns. Ran, always behind the camera, interviews her mother, documenting the heart of their conflicted relationship. Homosexuality is a fraught issue in China, and Ran’s mother struggles to understand her daughter’s queer identity. Their exchanges are sometimes harsh or even violent. They can also be humorous: when Ran’s mother asks whether she experiences sexual desire, Ran replies “Yes!” with a hint of provocation. Her mother, mouth agape, doesn’t know how to respond.

Ran filmed these scenes – which, like one of her mother dancing next to a window, are sometimes very beautiful – as a technical exercise. It was only when she returned to Switzerland that she edited the stream of images into a coherent narrative. When she began shooting, she had no idea that My Dear Dear Home would become a real film.

“I mainly wanted to practice with my camera,” she explains.

She created the short from limited material as she had very little footage from China.

“I hadn’t even told my mother that I’d made a film out of it, but when it was selected for Cinéma du Réel, I was obliged to!”

The filmmaker Yue Ran Lucie Perrotta

The film opens in Switzerland with Ran’s wedding to her partner, a ceremony that was necessary to simplify Ran’s move to Zurich. This light, vibrant introduction contrasts with what comes next: terse discussions in a gloomier Chinese city. The conversations between Ran and her mother are often one-sided and her mother’s words can seem cruel. But little by little, thanks in part to the presence of the camera, the older woman opens up. The narrative recounts her path, step by step, towards greater acceptance.

It rapidly becomes clear that cultural prejudice against homosexuality is intertwined with the traditional family structure still very present in Chinese society.

“All of this plays out on several levels,” Ran says.

There is, she explains, a gulf between the big cities, where queer social life exists in places like gay and lesbian bars, and rural regions, where LGBTQ issues are much more taboo.

“I have hope, of course,” Ran says. “I have hope in young people. I see that [they] are more open, but I’m not sure what the future holds for society. I come from a family marked by the one-child policy, many young people no longer want to get married, and the issue of the birth rate is becoming a social concern. Maybe gay people will end up being seen as an obstacle to increasing the birth rate.”

Ran’s belief in change, therefore, fluctuates from day to day.

“I watched a friend open a lesbian bar and I was excited, and then several months later I saw that it had closed.”

Ran says she made her film specifically for her young queer friends. If it gives them the courage to speak with their families and to live their lives and sexuality more fully, then it will have achieved its goal.

The film certainly conveys hope in the evolving relationship between mother and daughter. Its tense initial conversations, in which Ran’s mother bluntly expresses incomprehension and even disgust about her daughter’s queerness, give way to more nuanced connection.

“It’s truly a journey,” Ran says. “She increasingly accepts [my] relationship [with my partner]. She’s had four years, so she has no doubt experienced personal transformation, but there were also changes while I was making the film. Maybe it’s also easier for me to have these conversations having lived in France and Switzerland.”

The progress was also facilitated by Ran’s wife Lucie, a discreet but important character in the film. In one scene, she tells Ran’s mother about the desire and feelings she has for Ran.

“In China, no one says things so directly!” Ran says.

The personal family tensions are overlayed with a second main theme of My Dear Dear Home: the bursting of the property bubble in China in 2024. Ran’s father had invested in real estate and hidden his growing debts from his family. The film reveals a city in which construction is halted, with unfinished buildings frozen in time. This palpable anxiety helps Ran’s mother gradually accept her daughter’s sexuality – because she realises that her own traditional marriage doesn’t ensure a perfect future.

“She thought to herself: if I can lose everything overnight, why cling so tightly to social norms? What really counts is my relationship with my daughter,” Ran says.

Yue Ran’s great achievement is that she has managed to condense and interweave several complex themes into a short documentary film. Yue Ran

The film’s richness lies in its refusal to moralise. Instead, it shares the mother and daughter’s somewhat reciprocal relationship. In the intimate scenes of her mother dancing or stretching in front of the camera, Ran displays a loving curiosity at odds with her mother’s somewhat condescending scrutiny. This approach seems to affect her mother, resulting in more tender interactions.

This does not mean that the film is easy viewing; on the contrary, it unflinchingly and boldly holds a mirror to society.

“Living in Switzerland and other places abroad, I’ve met such different people, seen such different ways of living. All of this is what gave me the courage and the inspiration to tell my story.”

Will she continue to do so?

“Why not. But always in the same way: with a small crew and filming my friends!,” she says.

Edited by Virginie Mangin and Eduardo Simantob. Adapted from French by K. Bidwell/ac