After a scan, Tess is told about the potential presence of a lump in her breast. Her daughter Justine has accompanied her for the appointment. A mum, a mammogram… and a musical. An unlikely but successful combination to unveil a strained relationship and the reasons behind.

Director Dorothy Sing Zhang wanted to create “new images”, the kind you don’t have in mind when you say “musical”. This is a raw, non-sentimental take on the genre, where singing is meant to be pragmatic and rhythms are born from industrial sounds. Characters may not reach the right notes but their original musicality skins their repressed feelings. Actress and singer Leah Dou (daughter of Hong Kong music and screen legend Faye Wong, star of Chungking Express (1994) by Wong Kar-wai) had to forgo vocal prowess and rely more on emotion for the part of Justine. The deeply moving outcome could be a medical companion to the factory-set Dancer in the Dark (2000).