International Title: To my dearest

Original Title: 我最亲爱的

Director: Grace Hsia

Genre: Documentary

Year: 2026

Country: China, USA, Spain

Running Time: 22′

DOP: Grace Hsia

Editor: Grace Hsia

Original Music: G.K.Leo

Synopsis:

Chinese filmmaker Grace just froze her eggs in Europe. She decides to reunite with her best friend Shekinah, a single mother raising her son in a low-income community in USA. Through a reimagining of intimacy, their conversation question bodily autonomy and rewrite their own stories. Tender, radical, and utterly their own.

Shot on 16mm and S8mm across three continents, this visual diary by Grace Hsia witnesses their bond navigating womanhood and autonomy. A beginning of redefining self and family on their own terms.

Director statement:

This film began as a question I couldn’t answer alone: what does it mean to choose your own life?

In my thirties, caught between romantic frustrations, fertility anxiety, and a longing for belonging, I flew alone to Europe to freeze my eggs — a choice not permitted to single women in mainland China. To My Dearest is the film I am making from those images with my Super 8 camera — and from a trans-Pacific conversation with my best friend Shekinah, an American single mother raising her son alone.

Reuniting after years apart, we spent slow summer days in rural Georgia, navigating the messy beauty and harsh realities of daily life. Our raw, transformative conversations revealed a shared awakening — a refusal of inherited narratives about womanhood, family, and love, and a search for an alternative way to reimagine the memory of ourselves.

Across generations and continents, we were both navigating the same uncertainty. About our bodies. Our choices. Our fears. The families we were born into, and the ones we were trying to build.

I wanted our conversation to feel like memory itself: fragile, intimate, a little out of focus. Shot on Super 8mm, with its intimate texture, this visual diary bears witness to our embodied memories — capturing a vulnerability and tenderness unique to the medium. Straddling the line between documentary and personal diary, it witnesses two women navigating womanhood and autonomy. This film is also our proposal: that tenderness is a form of politics, that chosen love is as real as any inherited bond, and that a woman rewriting her own story is a quiet, radical act.

This is not the end of our story. It is the beginning.

Director’s Biography:

Grace Hsia (夏梦怡) is a Chinese film director, producer, and the founder of Wild Angle Films. An alumna of the Locarno Film Festival Documentary School (2023), she is also a filmmaking lecturer for LUMIX and CUHK (Shenzhen).

Her short films, Silent Storm (2022) and Broken Flowers (2019), have been selected for over 100 international festivals, including Busan, Tampere, LA Shorts, and Flickerfest. In 2023, she received the Gold Award of the Outstanding Talent Program led by director Jia Zhangke.

Grace previously worked as a documentary director at Enlight Pictures, one of China’s leading film studios. She also served as sponsorship producer for Shao Pan’s debut fiction feature Nangong Cheng (aka.南宫成), which premiered in the Tiger Competition at IFFR 2026.

Her directorial work focuses on womanhood, cross-cultural identity, belonging, and social issues. Inspired by years of living and traveling across China, Europe and the United States, She is currently developing her hybrid feature To My Dearest (aka.我最亲爱的), selected as one of 15 projects worldwide for the Visions du Réel pitching 2026.

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