Two Mountains Weighing Down My Chest. Unmoored Between Tradition and Liberation.

Viv Li’s Two Mountains Weighing Down My Chest (2026) is a disorienting mix of humorous travelogue and painful self-scrutiny, and one of the standouts in Panorama. In her feature debut, Li turns the camera on her own life as a Chinese artist moving between Berlin’s alternative queer circles and the more traditional, expectation-heavy world of her family in Beijing. Anyone who has moved to a new city in search of a freer version of themselves — and then felt slightly unmoored in both places — will recognise the feeling.

The film opens with queer skinny-dipping at a lake outside Berlin, an image of easy liberation. From there, Li sketches her new life in quick, collage-like fragments, while cutting back to Beijing in flashes. Family conversations have the rhythm of affectionate cross-examinations — about Covid, geopolitics, life in Europe. In both cities, we drop into chats with friends and acquaintances without much context; sometimes it’s unclear who this person is to her or how long they’ve known each other. There’s a playful looseness to it all, making for a consistently exciting and engaging film.

These conversations drift from one subject to another — gender, sex, fashion, health, housing, the odd realisation that the TV show Friends (Marta Kauffman, David Crane, 1994-2004) might have helped shape your idea of friendship, and so on. But a constant sense of unease runs underneath. In one scene, sitting in a red Ferrari in a Beijing parking lot with a friend, Li says, referring to Berlin, “The more open a place is, the more lost I feel.” It’s an honest admission about a city where openness is treated as an unquestioned virtue.

Li doesn’t condemn that world or its values, and she doesn’t romanticise it either. She simply describes how it feels to move through it as an outsider. In the conversation about Friends, Li and a friend question how long it takes for an outsider (immigrant) to start feeling like an insider (no easy answer). Later, she admits that her social life in Berlin can make her feel as though she has to try too hard to fit in. She speaks about cultural exchange as a one-way street: she adapts and makes compromises, yet little curiosity flows back toward her own background. These aren’t framed as big, dramatic moments, just thoughts and feelings presented matter-of-factly. She says it, and the film moves on to something new.

Li sticks mostly to static shots, but they never feel stiff. The compositions look rather casual at first glance, then you realise how deliberately they’re framed. Sometimes she’ll slip in a playful gesture, like placing the camera on a Lazy Susan during a family dinner so the frame rotates slowly around the table. The soundtrack is full of cheeky little needle drops that only add to the fun. Trio’s “Da Da Da” (1982) soundtracks her Beijing wanderings with dry detachment, and after the Ferrari confession, Julian Werding’s schlager banger “Wenn du denkst du denkst dann denkst du nur du denkst” (1975) cuts in — on the surface just another tacky old German hit, but the lyrics are actually about a woman holding her own. As the song plays, we bounce between Li eating on a Beijing corner, to the boredom of sitting on the sofa with her parents,  to what looks like a queer Berlin dance or art workshop — naked bodies, mattresses arranged between them, rising and falling in a kind of wave motion. The juxtaposition doesn’t spell anything out, but you feel the contrast between these spaces — the surreal, anything-goes Berlin vs. the boring old Beijing — and the way each world stretches her in a different direction.

By the end, the tension between Beijing and Berlin hasn’t fully been resolved, and in a film like this, it doesn’t need to be. The two cities and the lives she knows in both remain distinct gravitational pulls. What Li offers is a lively account of what it means to stand between them and still not know where home really is.