Editing is a key stage in the filmmaking process. It’s where tone, rhythm, and emotional nuances are defined through choices in pacing, structure, and sequence, revealing meaning through not only what’s said but how it’s shown.

That’s the space where filmmaker and editor Ruiting Liu has developed a distinctive voice.

Originally from China and now based in New York, Ruiting has focused on shaping stories through editing, mainly in the world of observational documentary . Across both experimental shorts and documentaries, she’s developed a quiet, deliberate style that builds narrative through capturing mundane details like routines, glances, silences, and seemingly irrelevant interactions that slowly unveil deeper themes of desire and uncertainty.

Read on for a closer look at Ruiting Liu’s approach to editing and how it has evolved to become a method of attention and a way to tell stories.

Shaping Stories Through Small Gestures

With a background in film and television, Ruiting has been shaping her voice as an editor through a range of projects, both experimental and narrative. She sees editing not just as a technical stage, but as a critical tool to guide the tone and pacing of a story — and as she describes it, her editing techniques aim to “convey emotional flow through rhythm, juxtaposition, and pauses, to let the unsaid and the unseen carry as much weight as what is shown.”

She first began shaping this approach while editing Home Conversation Practice, an experimental short about two neighboring women navigating their unspoken longing for connection. Instead of following a traditional plot, Ruiting treated the footage as an emotional collage, arranging small, carefully arranged moments and gestures to create a larger narrative.

One particular example she highlights is a shot of the protagonist rising from a pile of empty green trash bags: “The shot doesn’t serve a narrative function, but expresses a strong emotional shift that is a visual metaphor for the way her inner world begins to stir and change in response to the other woman’s presence.”

“Home Conversation Practice” was selected for the 2024 Clermont-Ferrand Film Festival Short Film Market and the New York Shorts International Film Festival, and screened at Cinema Village in Manhattan to a full audience. Most importantly, it was an early showcase of what would come to define Ruiting’s editing voice: minimal exposition, close attention to emotional detail, and an emphasis on ambiguity.

Stepping Into The Director’s Role With “JunTai Academy”

After working on several projects as an editor, Ruiting took on her first major creative project with JunTai Academy in 2024, a documentary that she directed, shot, and edited herself. Drawing inspiration from her previous editing works, she structured the film as an observational documentary, focusing on capturing unscripted, everyday moments as they unfold and letting meaning emerge through natural interactions and rhythms.

Filmed over six months, “JunTai Academy” focuses on the daily routines of Chinese immigrants in a Chinese massage school in Flushing, Queens. The film intentionally avoids interviews and backstory, instead building a story by showing students attending classes, chatting with family abroad, and interacting with one another. “We chose to show moments that unfolded naturally in this unique space, leaving the untold stories for the audience to imagine,” she explains.

The project carried a personal meaning for Ruiting. At the time, she was dealing with her own conflicts around home, identity, and the uncertainty that comes with living abroad, and found parallels between her story and that of the students.

“As an international student who hasn’t gone back home for years, I really miss my hometown,” she shares. “And once I got to meet the students at JunTai, I immediately decided to make a film about this group of people who shared the same hopes and fears as us, this group of strangers we were so familiar with.”

That connection informed the tone and structure of the film. Its observational style created space for emotions to build gradually, shaped by what was shown rather than explained, while the editing process allowed both her perspective and the subjects’ experiences to surface over time.

“JunTai Academy” was later shortlisted by the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen and selected for the 2025 Film Market at Visions du Réel. For Ruiting, the process helped solidify her long-term direction. “Because we captured so much observational footage, editing became a crucial part of shaping the narrative,” she recalls. “I became fascinated by that creative potential, and that experience ultimately led me to pursue editing as a professional path.”

Adapting Her Style To A Fast-Paced Format

While Ruiting’s primary focus remains on experimental and observational film, she has also built a parallel practice in vertical short-form media. Since graduating, she has edited multiple serialized dramas for platforms like ShortMax and FlexTV, where episodes are often just 90 seconds long and require a more condensed, fast-paced editing style.

Over the past year, she has worked on several high-performing series. Love Again, My Princess, one of her earliest projects in the format, with more than 153,000 collects on ShortMax, and other titles like Desired by the Billionaire Football Star gained similar traction, with over 83,000 collects on ShortMax and an 8.5/10 rating on IMDb.

Ruiting sees this work as an extension of the same editing approach she has developed in her longer-form projects. While the pacing is faster, she thinks of it as an opportunity to bring out emotional resonance within tighter constraints.

Her role, as she puts it, is to “help bring out the hidden nuances of the story, emphasizing the strength of their performances without overshadowing them.”

Continuing To Highlight The Smaller Moments

Ruiting continues to work on independent projects like “Rambling Accents,” which was recently accepted by the First International Film Festival, a service platform in China focused on promoting young filmmakers, and she’s also currently expanding into scripted work with her first narrative short, “Shadowing.”

The film follows a Chinese immigrant piano tuner navigating the contrast between her wealthy client’s Manhattan apartment and her own cramped living space. The character was partly inspired by people she met while filming “JunTai Academy,” where themes of imbalance and inequality across aspects like gender, class, and race shaped the film’s focus.

“I hope to continue spending time with immigrants, workers, and those living between worlds, and to stay with the small, often overlooked moments that speak volumes,” she concludes.

Whether working in documentary, narrative, or short-form media, Ruiting Liu’s goal when editing remains the same: to make space for small, quiet moments that carry the weight of deeper stories.