Giselle Lin’s Children’s Day follows the eight year old Xuan, on a quest to put together the perfect outfit for her school's ‘Children’s Day’, a day where the kids get to wear their own clothes, discarding their uniforms for a day of self expression. With her home life consisting of mean older sisters, an authoritative father, and a distracted mother, Xuan befriends her classmate.

In this gorgeous sunny-hued short, Giselle holds up the microscope to the adolescent girl's experience, in all its unfiltered glory and strain. The film uses the guise of Xuan’s perspective as a means of depicting the struggles of an eight year old girl, who must navigate the hardships of school and her family life.
The film is mostly sweet, with a string of heartbreaking moments, in which Xuan’s friend insults her facial features. Despite the innocent intent of the comment, Xuan is constantly in flux with her physical transition from child to girl, and must deal with her siblings who make no effort to bond with her, and her father who would rather provide an authoritative environment than one of support and mutual respect. On top of this, her mother is preoccupied with her newborn baby, and has less time to interact with her daughter. With all of this circulating in her young mind, Xuan thinks it is vital that she showcases her best self at her Children’s Day school event. Her classmate opted to make a pact to wear skirts and lip gloss so they can match, and Xuan makes this her driving force. 

Children’s Day is Giselle Lin’s fourth short directorial effort, each film poignantly contextualising the female experience with honesty and ardent observance. This film uses the currencies of girlhood; lip gloss, skirts, and sparkly gel pens, as a means to highlight the importance of presenting oneself at this impressionable age. Emma Lim gives a spectacular performance in her debut leading role, encapsulating all the emotion and adversities of being an eight year old girl desperate to fit in and find a sense of belonging. 

In one memorable sequence, Xuan’s mother asks ‘What's it like to be eight? I forgot.’ The film does a wonderfully authentic job at asking this exact question, showing the spectator both the difficulties and the little victories all at once. The film is woven together painstakingly with uttermost care and responsibility, keen on depicting the nostalgia of adolescence without shedding the hardships too. 

Personally speaking, I wouldn’t go back to childhood if you paid me, and this makes the experience of watching Xuan’s perspective all the more devastating and moving. Her problems may seem like nothing to the adults around her, but to Xuan, it’s her whole world crashing down on her with the intensity of a storm.