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In Violet Du Feng’s “Hidden Letters,” an elder says women “were only slaves to men” before the concept of gender equality was introduced by Mao’s Great Push Forward — and that was only 60 years ago. This graceful feature, which just made the Oscar documentary shortlist, provides an angle on which to consider how far women’s roles have — and haven’t — evolved in Chinese society since.

That angle is the “secret script” of Nushu, a written form invented by and used for communication between women otherwise forbidden to read or write. Feng’s engaging film offers a gently questioning perspective on whether the issues this now-quaint private language addressed retain currency in today’s China, where economically driven progressive attitudes may as yet only superficially impact deep-seated cultural ones. “Letters” commenced a limited U.S. theatrical release on Dec. 9, launches on VOD Dec. 23 and has a PBS playdate slotted...

A woman in an audience declares with a smile that “we understand nothing, but it makes me happy.” She’s responding to what it’s like to hear or read Nushu, a language devised by women of their grandmothers’ generation in Jiangyong county within China's Hunan province to communicate with one another at a time when only men were literate.

Kept behind closed doors, where it eluded men for decades, today there is a Nushu museum, and younger women like the subjects of this film, Hu Xin and Simu, attempt to keep the language and its history in the cultural consciousness. As this documentary attests to though, trying to keep a language alive, and foster awareness of its value within a climate of irrepressible commercialisation where men seem to pull the strings, can be a battle.

Hidden Letters isn’t a documentary about academia or education, fields where you might...

The nushu system, still practised in China, reveals a long history of women’s frustrations and the solace this art provides

Nushu is a traditional secret writing system used by women in Jiangyong county in China’s Hunan province: slender, diamond-shaped characters they used to vent their frustrations and record their inner lives. This haunting but slyly subversive documentary about three present-day nushu specialists uses the practice to examine women’s changing roles in a China modernising at breakneck speed – though the forces of resistance are evident in the numerous episodes of impressive mansplaining surrounding this female preserve.

A prize-winning nushu expert working at a Jiangyoung museum, Hu Xin frets about how the essence of the art is being watered down in dance-based presentations demanded by tourists. She believes it deals at heart in “misery” – and so looks up to wizened calligrapher He Yanxin, who raised her four children solo,...

The past, present and future of women in China’s oppressively patriarchal society is a big topic to address in under 90 minutes, but Violet Du Feng’s unassuming but very moving documentary Hidden Letters covers a lot of ground.

Visually, it has the immediate, low-key digital-video look that’s increasingly typical of festival docs, and which may restrict its audience to the specialist circuit. But there’s a lot going on under the surface in a film that looks at the subject of Nushu, an ancient secret language used by Chinese women to talk to each other without their husbands, fathers, and even their sons knowing.

“Nushu is mostly about misery,” notes Hu Xin, a tour guide at the Nushu Museum in Jiangyong County. Hu Xin is our port of entry into this secret world, depicting a time still in living memory when women were subordinate to men, foot-binding was...