Yuan Yuan embraces uncertainty in When Winter Comes

Can you tell us a little about your journey into directing?

I grew up in a working-class family in China. There was a movie theatre near our apartment, and the neighbourhood kids often played there. One day, while we were playing hide-and-seek, I hid inside a screening room. I became so absorbed in the film that I completely forgot about the game. That was when I first fell in love with movies.

After college, I started working as an assistant director. Working alongside experienced directors made me realise that what I truly wanted to do was write and direct my own films. So I applied to film school, and I’ve been writing and developing my own projects ever since.

The film was inspired by your experience helping a classmate’s mother search for her missing daughter in the US. What stayed with you from that experience, and how did you decide what needed to be transformed rather than directly recreated for the film?

It was a heartbreaking experience. In many suspense films about a missing person, the focus is on what happened and why they disappeared. But what stayed with me most was how little my friend’s mother knew about her life in the US, and how little I knew about my friend’s true life as well. That distance brought up complicated emotions: guilt, anger, grief and even denial.

In many suspense films about a missing person, the focus is on what happened and why they disappeared. But what stayed with me most was how little my friend’s mother knew about her life in the US.

So for the film, I wanted to shift the focus away from solving the mystery. What interested me more was the emotional struggle and experience of the people left behind.

The story takes its time revealing what has happened, with details arriving gradually and dramatic cuts sometimes interrupting conversations mid-line. How did you use withholding and those abrupt transitions to control what the audience knows and feels?

When I first started writing the script, I wrote from the mother’s point of view. But I soon realised that it was more painful to watch her closely from the outside than to experience everything directly through her perspective.

At first, the audience thinks they understand the situation. But gradually, they realise that they don’t fully understand this woman they have just met on screen. To me, that is similar to how we encounter people in real life: we form an impression, but there is always something we don’t know.

That idea stayed with us throughout the filmmaking process. It shaped the shot design, the choice of lenses, and especially the editing. We were always thinking about how much the audience knew, and how much the mother knew about her daughter’s situation. The abrupt cuts helped us withhold certain information and keep the audience slightly unsettled. In the editing room, we tried many different versions and even changed the order of scenes to see how it changed the feeling of watching her.

Above: The trailer for When Winter Comes, which is currently making its way around the festival circuit.

We stay very close to Yong Mei, but her refusal to accept what has happened feels more like denial than a mystery the audience is expected to believe. Was it important that we understand the truth before she is able to face it?

That’s an interesting question. What was important to me was planting a seed of doubt in the audience’s mind. I wanted them to begin questioning the person they had been following throughout the film, but also to question themselves: “Maybe I was wrong.” I wanted to explore that uncertainty and create a viewing experience that feels different from many films, where the audience is clearly told what to believe.

There is no conventional score, but the film is rarely silent; it is carried by traffic, rooms, machinery and the gentle hum of everyday life continuing around Yong Mei. Why did you choose to build the emotional atmosphere through environmental sound rather than music?

I love music, and I also play instruments. But music can be so powerful that it sometimes takes over a film, while we forget how expressive sound itself can be. It’s like using close-ups: if every shot is a close-up, the most important one loses its impact. One of my favourite directors, Robert Bresson, once wrote, “The ear goes more towards the within, the eye towards the outer.”

For this film, I set a rule for myself not to use a traditional score. Instead, I wanted to make full use of environmental sound and sound design. From traffic and New York radiators to recurring sounds of water, these elements work on both a realistic and a subconscious level. My sound designer and I had a lot of fun building that world together.

The palm-reading scene balances hope and despair beautifully: Yong Mei hears what appears to be good news, while we can feel how desperately she needs to believe it. How did you approach the tone of that scene without making either the palm reader or Yong Mei seem naïve?

I went to graduate school in New York, where I often saw men dressed as monks asking for donations on the street. Growing up in China, I had also seen people dressed as monks telling fortunes for money, and I always assumed they were scammers. So I initially imagined the palm reader as an obvious fake monk.

For this film, I set a rule for myself not to use a traditional score. Instead, I wanted to make full use of environmental sound and sound design.

While preparing the scene, I spoke with a Buddhist friend about which scripture might reflect Yong Mei’s inner struggle. He recommended the Heart Sutra to me, but he also said something that changed my perspective: if the man is a real monk, he is sincerely praying for her. But even if he is fake, his prayer may still be sincere, although the way he makes money is questionable.

At that moment, he gives Yong Mei what she needs most. In that sense, a fake monk can fulfil the role of a real monk in someone’s life without actually being one. The line between real and fake becomes less clear, and it is no longer so easy for us to judge him.

That idea really inspired me and changed the way I directed the scene. I asked the actor not to play him as a fraud, but with sincerity. Yong Mei isn’t naïve, either. After a month of uncertainty, he is the first person to tell her that her daughter is alive. Desperately, she wants to hold on to that hope.

Eleven Lee’s performance is remarkably controlled, with much of Yong Mei’s grief expressed through routine, repetition and small physical choices rather than overt emotion. How did you work together to find that restraint?

She is a very hardworking actor. During casting, I saw many different interpretations of the character, but Eleven stood out because of her restraint. Instead of crying, she simply sat there and talked about her daughter, and it brought tears to my eyes.

She wasn’t our first choice initially because she was younger than we had imagined for the role. But in the end, I decided to work with her and find ways to make her appear older.

During filming, I gave her physical actions to immerse herself in, as if Yong Mei were keeping busy because she couldn’t process her grief. Whenever she had to stop and face reality, it became unbearable.

Above: Yuan Yuan, the director behind YDA Gold-winning short.

The performances throughout feel extremely natural and unforced. How did you create the conditions for that on set, particularly in scenes carrying such complicated grief?

I tried to focus on what the characters had just experienced rather than telling them which emotions to perform. Before each scene, I would ask Eleven, “Where have you just come from?” She might be cleaning, for example, but an hour earlier she had been at the police station examining a dead body. That history changed the way she cleaned and made each action feel different.

Rather than rehearsing the film’s scenes, we spent a great deal of time improvising moments that aren’t shown in the film: Yong Mei first learning that her daughter was missing, arriving for the first time, speaking to the police, or meeting her daughter’s roommate. These exercises gave Eleven real experiences to draw from. When she entered a scene, she wasn’t trying to perform an emotion; she was reacting to something the character had already lived through.

Once I had the shot I wanted, we would also let Eleven do one or two takes of her own, setting aside any notes I had given her. Sometimes she offered unexpected performances that revealed something entirely new.

The film ends without offering confirmation, catharsis or a conventional resolution; Yong Mei’s life simply continues inside that uncertainty. As a filmmaker, was it difficult to resist tying up the story or giving the audience a more definitive emotional release?

Yes, it was very tempting to tie everything up and offer a clear resolution. That gives the audience a sense of closure and allows them to leave the film feeling released. I had done that in my previous short films.

Rather than rehearsing the film’s scenes, we spent a great deal of time improvising moments that aren’t shown in the film: Yong Mei first learning that her daughter was missing, arriving for the first time, speaking to the police, or meeting her daughter’s roommate.

With this project, I actually wrote the feature version first, about a mother searching for her missing daughter. At a certain point, I felt stuck, so I made the short as a way to explore the character and discover a different language for the larger story. That gave me permission to be more experimental and avoid a conventional ending.

I hope the uncertainty stays with the audience, not as a question they need answered, but as an emotional experience they share with Yong Mei. I hope they worry about her, care about her, and feel that her story continues beyond the film.

What did making this film teach you that you’ll take into your next project?

As I mentioned, I wrote the feature version first. I realised how easy it is, in a missing-person story, for the focus to shift towards the person who is missing. Every investigation and clue leads us towards that person, and we can end up knowing very little about the one who is searching.

Making the short changed the way I saw the feature. I decided to rewrite it and shift the entire structure, placing the mother’s experience at the centre. I want to understand who she is beyond being a mother, as a whole person.