Sun Kun’s thoughtful, measured short film The Wind in Ash is a perfect independent Chinese drama in miniature, elegantly telling in 18 minutes what could easily be expanded to more than 90. There is ample room for depth and further exploration of its characters, should Sun decide to revisit and expand the material, but that does not take away from the satisfying work that they have assembled here.

Student and photographer Xiaoxiao (Yan Lin) returns home to China for their father’s funeral. Their mother Zheng (Peixin Li), somewhat ironically, works detailing headstones. Xiaoxiao is genderqueer, and wants to know if they are to be named on their father’s headstone as a son or a daughter. It is obvious that deeper questions are waiting to be answered, and it is unclear if Zheng actually has the answers to give.

This is a gentle and pleasingly non-judgemental film, contrasting a character who has clearly been able to express their identity abroad with a childhood environment where that identity may not be so easily understood. Xiaoxiao’s photography seems a valuable outlet, and its still images provide silent moments of emotion in lieu of dialogue. Much is left unsaid, and while some story elements are easy to glean from context – extended family keep mentioning how boyish Xiaoxiao looks, for example – others are left for the viewer to assume or surmise by themselves.

Yan Lin’s central performance is quiet, naturalistic, and deeply moving. There is a hesitancy in how they interact with their extended family, and an awkwardness than comes from a place of honesty and lived experience. Peixin Li is also superb, presenting a more brittle personality but a similar sort of uncertainty. By film’s end her mixed emotions hit a point of reckoning, and it is riveting to see how both her choices and her feelings in the film’s silent final scene.

Technically the film feels as if it was borne directly out of the Beijing Film Academy, and any viewer familiar with independent Chinese film will be all too familiar with the largely static camera work, the lack of non-diegetic sound, and the strong realist aesthetic of the film overall. It is a style of which I never seem to tire, and which so often allows the most honest of human moments to puncture the surface of its deceptively ordinary appearance. The Wind in Ash is a excellent short film, and like the best of early career works promises a considerable feature filmmaking talent on the horizon.

The Wind in Ash is screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival on the 11th and 15th of August 2026, as part of the International Shorts 1 program. Click here for more information.