Two Mountains Weighing Down My Chest
New Directors/New Films 2026
April 8 - 19
In her feature debut, artist Viv Li jumps back and forth between Berlin’s ultra-permissive alternative culture and her family in Beijing in this puckish and self-aware autodoc, a portrait of becoming and belonging in a connected but confusing world.
Immersed in Berlin’s body-positive, gender-nonconforming, multilingual alternative art scene, Beijing-born artist Viv Li is feeling her way through new rules and norms around social restrictions and physical touch when she returns for a visit to her more traditional family. As unclassifiable in genre as its subjects are by gender, culture, or any other identity, Two Mountains Weighing Down My Chest leaps back and forth between twin peeks at Europe and China in film-diary entries and snippets of documentary that come at the audience rapid-fire. Li jumps between continents and tones at an unpredictable rhythm that evokes the often hilarious dislocations and disconnections of globalism and the freedom of personal reinvention, with each scene radically open to self-deprecating humor, defiant awkwardness, sidelong pathos, and the electric feeling of discovery.
Travel support generously provided by the German Film Office
