Floating Melon

On a day of passion turned nightmare, Xiao Cheng, a young man from Chengdu, is confronted with a devastating reality after breaking the law. When his lover, a married man, dies from a drug overdose, fear drives him to seek help from his friend Fiona and his girlfriend Lola.

Caught between panic, guilt, and mistrust, the three friends must decide how far they are willing to go to conceal the truth—until nothing turns out as they expected. In a place where everything can be false, anything can happen.

Floating Melon (2015) (Sandía amarga / Fu Guo) is a Chinese–Spanish short film by filmmakers Roberto F. Canuto and Xu Xiaoxi, known for their poetic and socially engaged cinema.

The film is the second chapter of the Invisible Chengdu trilogy, a series of stories set in Sichuan and spoken in the Sichuanese dialect, portraying hidden lives within Chengdu’s urban underworld.

Through its raw realism and intimate perspective, Floating Melon reflects the confusion of a generation searching for moral direction within a society governed by appearances and repression. The film exposes the invisibility of the LGBTQ+ community in China—not always openly persecuted, but often forced into silence by family pressure and a lack of protection—and highlights the fragility of identity and the danger of fear in a culture where silence becomes a means of survival.