The conceptually short film Butterfly (No Fly), recently selected for the Sheffield Shorts (UK) and as a semi-finalist at Mirada Corta Short Film Festival (Mexico), has garnered international attention for its layered choreography, poetic imagery, and the striking use of costume as both emotional and spatial language. This was not a conventional narrative production, but a collaborative inquiry between director Huiwen Ran, performer Juice Cui, and fashion designer Hongfei Qian into a single, evolving question:
How does the human spirit balance inner longing and existential emptiness across fractured dimensions of time, memory, and identity?
Rather than assigning static roles, the three creators constructed a sensory landscape where movement, sound, and clothing operated as equal agents within a shared architecture of emotion and perception.
Conceptual project ：A touchable time carrier —— Early research
Garment as Inquiry: From Research to Visual Structure
Hongfei Qian contributed an existing conceptual project —developed as part of her broader exploration into emotional form and duality. The team was drawn to the way her work balanced fragility with confrontation, and abstraction, offering a sensory route to themes the film also investigates: the instability of identity, the weight of time, and the spatial nature of inner experience.
Butterfly (No Fly) stills and design manuscripts
The garments introduce an emotional haze—a liminal space between exposure and withdrawal, presence and deferral. Fragmented along curved seams and slit openings, they interrupt the body’s visual continuity, producing a heightened sense of tension and spatial dislocation.
Across both looks, Qian explores not only visual contrast but structural polarity: softness versus rigidity, containment versus release, image versus void. Through sheer fabric and offset construction, each garment becomes an emotional container—a framework that questions how identity is composed, fractured, or concealed in transitional states. This inquiry unfolds through rhythm, spatial logic, and embodied tension, rather than symbolic representation.
Equal Authorship in an Interdisciplinary Landscape
The collaborationfrom a shared conceptual interest between director, performer, and fashion designer in navigating existential weight through interdisciplinary means. For Hongfei Qian, whose work consistently seeks to translate Eastern philosophical motify into a globally legible fashion language, the film offered an opportunity to test how clothing might operate as emotional architecture within time-based media.
The result is a piece that resists spectacle. Instead of narrating identity, it frames its instability. Instead of decorating the body, it proposes a physical space for inward negotiation. It is here that Butterfly (No Fly) distinguishes itself—not as a costume-driven production, but as a visual meditation shaped through equal authorship across dance, cinema, and experimental fashion.
