“Mothertongue” is one of two new films by renowned Korean-Chinese director Zhang Lu; the other being “Gloaming in Luomu. Both films share—in addition to certain thematic similarities—the principal cast. There’s Bai Baihe as Chunshu (“Spring Tree,” which is also the film’s original title), Liu Dan as her acting teacher Miss Zhang, and Wang Chuanjun as Miss Zhang’s son, Dongdong.

Chunshu is a moderately successful actress who has been working in Beijing for ten years, albeit in “niche films,” as she herself puts it. Her relationship with her current boyfriend is over, and so she decides to return to her hometown of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province. She’s supposed to star in another film there, but the casting falls through because she doesn’t (or no longer) speak the local dialect. We soon learn why when she visits her old acting teacher. It turns out that the teacher had practically eradicated the dialect from her student, arguing that the only language understood by all 1.4 billion Chinese people was standard Mandarin.