Film Review: HIDDEN LETTERS: A Remarkable Story of a Secret Language [Tribeca 2022]

Hidden Letters Review

Hidden Letters (2022) Film Review from the 21st Annual Tribeca Film Festival, a movie directed by Violet Du Feng and Qing Zhao, written by Violet Du Feng and John Farbrother and starring Xin Hu, Simu Wu and He Yanxin.

Filmmaker Violet Du Feng’s new picture, Hidden Letters, tells audiences a remarkable story. It is a documentary yet the vivid revelation of facts that I knew little about was, in a word, fascinating. This picture will create so much interest in the subject matter that it presents, it hardly feels like a documentary. All the central women on screen are captivating and realistic. This film is about Nushu which is a secret language (a code, if you will) that women used to communicate for centuries so that other people who weren’t let in on the language wouldn’t understand what these ladies were conveying.

Nushu is a topic that has piqued the curiosity of its followers for years. Chinese women were once thought to be the property of men and were not allowed to have opinions of their own. These women simply did what was expected of them. As Nushu was created, messages were expressed in a secret language and were sometimes even written on handkerchiefs. Arranged marriages had caused suppression of dreams and the creation of art but as the years passed, more freedom of expression by women was brought into view.

Wu Simu is one of the most interesting ladies in the movie, if not the most intriguing of the women the film presents. She married a man born on the same day as her but later, it turned out, she became the victim of this man’s own sexism. Simu ended up getting into a marriage which had much less promise of hope than she had anticipated. Simu had to fight to maintain the individualistic tendencies she possessed and Simu realized that the wishful thinking she initially had was too good to be true.

He Yanxin is another of the several women the movie presents to the audience. Yanxin was wise beyond her years and made Nushu a part of her life that helped define who she was as a person. Yanxin is intelligent and the movie wisely focuses its attention on what made her and her following of Nushu so unique. You won’t be able to take your eyes off the screen when Yanxin is on screen.

Nushu is the kind of secret language conveyed on store signs. For example, in a hilarious scene, it is used to express the idea that one business location is actually a sex shop. When the film shows us the development of Nushu and how it took form and eventually was presented in Beijing, the movie makes us understand why Nushu was so important for those who used it and followed it. Xin Hu, the other main woman the film showcases, is strongly developed and we follow her every step of the way throughout the movie as well.

Hidden Letters makes one ponder the possibility of what Chinese culture could have been had women been permitted to be free thinkers and contributors to society for the centuries in which they were suppressed. Women have taken a major step up in America’s workforce and it would be nice to think that even this country had some form of “hidden letters” that were used by women such as housewives to express their disgust with the way society had pigeonholed them into distinct roles which were not definitive of what these women were actually capable of.

Poetry, music and writing are just a small fraction of what Hidden Letters deals with as a film. Without those methods of expression, life would be a much bleaker and much colder place to live. When one of our women becomes a doctor during the course of the movie, it’s a giant indicator that women are no longer living simply for men but rather for themselves—the way it should be.

Hidden Letters is a movie that holds the viewer captive for the duration of the film’s running time. We can only hope we’ve evolved as a society (and as a world) after viewing these experiences of some very distinguished ladies. One must think that the more time passes, stories like the one this movie tells will be less commonplace. While the documentary is not perfect for the fact that it doesn’t really deal with the complexities of men on the same level it does its women, this movie is not about the men. This picture is for the women who have suffered and can now express their thoughts through a language that nobody would understand unless one took the time to truly try to grasp it. This is an important film that should not be missed.

Rating: 8/10

Leave your thoughts on this Hidden Letters review and the film below in the comments section. Readers seeking to support this type of content can visit our Patreon Page and become one of FilmBook’s patrons. Readers seeking more Tribeca Film Festival news can visit our Tribeca Film Festival Page, our Film Festival Page, and our Film Festival Facebook Page. Readers seeking more film reviews can visit our Movie Review Page, our Movie Review Twitter Page, and our Movie Review Facebook Page. Want up-to-the-minute notifications? FilmBook staff members publish articles by Email, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, Reddit, and Flipboard.