Girlfriends is a semi-autobiographical feature by Macau-born director Tracy Choi. Its protagonist, Lok (Fish Liew), is likewise a queer filmmaker from Macau living in Hong Kong. In her mid-thirties, she finds herself at a crossroads faced with a faltering career and mounting tensions with her partner (Jennifer Yu). The narrative then unfolds in reverse chronology: the second chapter revisits her 22-year-old self (Elizabeth Tang) studying in Taiwan, while the third returns to her adolescence in Macau, where the 17-year-old Lok (Natalie Hsu) explores her identity amid familial and social expectations. The film ultimately circles back to the present at last, as the adult Lok attempts to resolve her current challenges.
From Lok’s perspective, Girlfriends offers a nuanced portrait of the cultural differences between Macau, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. In Macau, the teenage Lok is frequently confined to the cramped family apartment, where academic achievement is treated as an obligation and career prospects appear limited to the gambling industry. Her uncertainty reflects how the tight interpersonal relationships in the small city can feel overwhelming. The chapter in Taiwan, by contrast, is bathed in a bright visual tone. Encouraged by a more liberal social atmosphere, she sheds the image of the dutiful daughter by adopting her striking orange undercut, thus embracing her sexuality and artistic ambition. This freedom quietly vanishes in the cold, fast-paced Hong Kong, where she cannot afford to linger after the traffic light turns green. By grounding these observations in everyday experience rather than a macro social critique, the movie remains relatable to local and foreign audiences.
Girlfriends is a meticulously observed and retrospective movie. It illustrates Lok’s personal growth in great detail, from her compliance with parental expectations to her tentative investment in her first same-sex relationship and, later, her uneasy negotiation between artistic aspirations and economic realities. In both Taiwan and Hong Kong, she is ambushed by her girlfriends’ careful career and housing plans in pursuit of stability, while she is not yet ready and has no idea what her next step should be..
These dilemmas and emotional shifts are not told through melodrama; but rather through the fleeting interactions between the characters, subtle gestures of self-reflection, and the cast’s understated performances. The reverse chronology further deepens the film’s reflective quality, transforming it into a soft poem to the younger selves. As a result, the movie beautifully captures how a girl navigates her fluid and perpetually evolving identity at different life stages.
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As its title suggests, Girlfriends is fundamentally a film about women. It is populated almost entirely by female characters, with only a couple of men, such as Lok’s dad and classmates, playing minimal roles in the story. Unlike many queer dramas, the film does not derive conflict from questions of sexual identity, family rejection, or relationships with men. Instead, it concentrates on female intimacy and self-discovery. In doing so, it demonstrates that women can occupy the centre of a narrative without requiring male validation or opposition, granting them a degree of agency still uncommon in mainstream cinema.
Nevertheless, this approach can be a double-edged sword as it risks making the queer setting feel incidental.. By treating queerness as an ordinary fact of life rather than a source of conflict, Girlfriends succeeds in normalising queer experience. At the same time, however, it risks rendering its queer framework almost entirely incidental. Lok’s anxieties about career uncertainty, financial stability, and artistic compromise are hardly unique to queer individuals; they are concerns shared by countless young adults navigating contemporary society. This universality raises the question of whether the queer dimension contributes meaningfully to the narrative beyond representation itself. It is also uncertain whether the predictable storyline of growth and relationship struggles is strong enough to support a full-length feature movie without relying on the queer framework for distinction.
The English title Girlfriends is modest and straightforward, whereas the Chinese title translates as The Girl is Not Ordinary. Ironically, the protagonist is a very ordinary girl who cannot resolve her life challenges even by the time the credits roll. She is less impulsive than her younger self, but she remains equally adrift and still struggles to communicate with her partner and family with complete honesty. By socially conventional standards. She remains somewhat immature. While this may seem like a lack of growth or plot progression, it is perhaps representative of the life path of most people in the real world.
Ultimately, Girlfriends is not all about lesbian romance. It is a realistic and tender reflection of what growth is actually like – uncertain, circuitous, and sometimes static. The film suggests that simply continuing to navigate life’s never-ending hurdles is already extraordinary in itself.
Girlfriends is out in UK Cinemas from Friday 19th June 2026. See here for more details
