Essay: A Body in Motion, Love Left Behind | Open City Documentary Festival 2022

Essay on Zheng Lu Xinyuan’s Jet Lag (2022) commissioned by Open City Documentary Festival 2022.

In Spring 2018, Chinese filmmaker Zheng Lu Xinyuan visited Myanmar with her family to attend a relative’s wedding. Between the celebrations and sightseeing trips around the city, her grandmother learned about her father who emigrated to the country from China in the 1940s leaving his wife and children behind. In Zheng Lu’s second feature the mystery of a missing patriarch triggers an investigation into the murkiness of family mythologies, intergenerational trauma and loss. Sidestepping a formal narrative, the filmmaker pieces together footage from her visit to Myanmar, a lockdown spent with her girlfriend in Austria two years later and intimate scenes with loved ones in China as they return to normal life. The result is a mesmerising essay film in which timelines and geographical boundaries are blurred to the point of near abstraction.