A DIAMOND IN THE BELLY

Director Siyi Chen

Genre Animated documentary

Language English, Chinese

Running time 10 minutes

Stage of production in development

Country of production France

Year 2027

LOGLINE

Haunted by ancestral echoes, a woman descends into a world where memory infects the flesh, discovering that acceptance means surrendering to the very wounds she hoped to cleanse.

Director — Siyi Chen

Siyi Chen is a writer, director and editor born in China, shaped in New York. She studied World History and Chinese Literature at Peking University and earned an MA in News and Documentary from New York University.

Her debut feature, Dear Mother, I Meant to Write About Death (2022), premiered at the Busan International Film Festival, where it received a Special Mention. It went on to screen at IDFA, where it was nominated for Best First Feature, and was supported by the IDFA Bertha Fund, Chicken & Egg Pictures’ Accelerator Lab, SFFILM, and the Asian Cinema Fund.

As an editor, she most recently cut Made in Ethiopia (2024), which premiered at Tribeca Film Festival, earning a Special Jury Mention, and was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sheffield International Documentary Festival.

Her films often explore migration, identity, and family, painting imaginative portraits of women in the diaspora. She also writes poetry in Mandarin and English.

Siyi is a 2025 Berlinale Talent, 2024-2026 Firelight Documentary Lab Fellow, a 2019 SFFILM New American Fellow and a former artist-in-residence at the Jacob Burns Film Center.