Jet Lag

In her two feature-length works, Chinese filmmaker Zheng Lu Xin­yuan (*1991) sounds out the possibilities of autobiographical cinema in fearless, formally creative fashion. InJET LAG, her second feature-length work, she connects different times and places into a personal essay about intimacy, family, absent fathers, life as part of a diaspora and the unreliable nature of memory. Reflections from pandemic-enforced isolation in an apartment in Graz and a quarantine hotel in China are woven together with family history: a family trip to Myanmar in search of the traces of the filmmaker’s great-grandfather, who travelled there in the 40s and never returned. His mysterious disappearance continues to emotionally affect his daughter, Zheng Lu Xinyuan’s grandmother, to this day. The moments captured on DVCAM and smartphone camera, the constant use of black and white and the non-linear arrangement of the images create an impression of drifting through time and space. (bik)