When Winter Comes is a Spike Lee funded film made by Yuan Yuan, while at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. It’s about a Chinese woman named Yong Mei Li (Eleven Lee) who comes to New York to search for her missing daughter, who is a student in the city. The film begins with Yong Mei being shown the body of a drowned girl, but she refuses to accept that this could be her daughter.
When Winter Comes is an impressive student film, centred around Eleven Lee’s mesmerising central performance. It’s very well shot and colour graded, to reflect the wintery feel of the title. There are several scenes of Yong Mei taping missing posters to lampposts on New York streets at what looks like dawn or dusk – with a blue-grey hue creating a melancholic atmosphere. Although we do not know how long the daughter has been missing, these scenes convey that it has been some time, and Yong Mei is habitually performing what is most likely a futile ritual.
Another stand-out element of When Winter Comes is the sound design, which is mostly based around water. Even though Yong Mei does not want to accept the possibility that her daughter has drowned, she is clearly haunted by the sights and sounds of water. When the body bag is unzipped at the start, there’s a loud splashing sound, as if the body is still floating in water and it has spilled out. When Yong Mei uses a washing-up bowl to clean her daughter’s dorm room, a passing train causes ripples in the water, and the train sound segues into the sound of crashing waves. When Yong Mei stops at a fishmongers, she watches fish swimming in a tank. One is dead, and floating upside down, and the sounds of water become loud and overwhelming for Yong Mei.
Within its short run-time, When Winter Comes powerfully conjures up a palpable relationship between a mother and daughter – even though the daughter’s absence is felt throughout. Eleven Lee is utterly convincing as a grief-stricken mother, absolutely stuck in the ‘denial’ stage, who refuses to stop searching for her beloved child. By using the real streets of New York, (which are beautifully shot), and authentic locations such as the daughter’s dorm room, Yuan Yuan has created a thoroughly believable character within a world that is tangible and relatable. When Winter Comes is a signal of a talented new filmmaker and I look forward to seeing her future work.
