Global EditionASIA 中文雙語(yǔ)Fran?ais
    Culture
    Home / Culture / Film and TV

    'Finding Yingying' finds vanishing point between sorrow and hope

    Xinhua | Updated: 2020-10-20 10:23
    Share
    Share - WeChat

    LOS ANGELES -- "We don't portray her as a victim," Jiayan "Jenny" Shi, director-producer of the feature length documentary Finding Yingying, insisted after the film was premiered to critical acclaim on Friday at the prestigious Chicago International Film Festival.

    Finding Yingying focuses on the uplifting life and tragic death of visiting Chinese scholar Yingying Zhang, who vanished on June 9, 2017 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign campus.

    Shi, together with producers Brent E. Huffman and Diane Moy Quon, brought Yingying's story to the screen.

    The Hollywood Reporter described the film as "a deft portrait of a family on the razor's edge between hope and dread"; IndieWire saw it as "handcrafted and haunting"; while a Rotten Tomatoes critic said it "shines a light on the culture clash between two vastly different countries in ways that can be uncomfortable to see."

    "I was drawn to the case by the similarities in our lives," said Chinese-born Shi, formerly a classmate of Yingying's at Peking University in Beijing, who was also studying in Illinois at the time of Yingying's disturbing disappearance there.

    Shi said after the premiere that unlike other true crime documentaries, she intended Finding Yingying to be "a film about Yingying's beautiful life and the impact she had on others."

    Forgoing the sensationalism and gore that are the lifeblood of crime documentaries, Finding Yingying is centered not around the monster who ended her life, but around Yingying herself.

    Instead, Shi brings Yingying to life as a vibrant, curious and driven young woman who thrilled to the spirit of discovery, marveled at learning new things and going to new places; who loved music, played in a band and was given to singing aloud in the fields as she studied ecology - all the while struggling to overcome feelings of homesickness and loneliness over ten thousand kilometers from home.

    In short, she was an extraordinary young woman with a promising future determined to leave her mark in the world.

    "Life is too short to be ordinary," Yingying said in her diary.

    Shi was a volunteer in the extensive search for Yingying, which was led first by local police and later the FBI before it spiraled into an international incident making global headlines, especially in China. She began taping their investigation for her journalism class, but the film really took on a life of its own when Shi was granted exclusive access behind-the-scenes with Yingying's family.

    While the film follows the search for the missing student, it gives it a soul by juxtaposing Yingying's joyful musings in her private journal with a haunting, gut-wrenching insider's view of her family's loss and despair as the search and investigation drag on and hope slowly dies.

    Delving behind the scenes into the family's anguish with a frank yet sympathetic eye, viewers watch as they slide into a vortex of blame and self-recrimination that has them all teetering on the brink of an explosive collapse. Mother, Father, and kid brother Yangyang who's been marginalized and nearly forgotten by his parent's inability to see beyond their own grief.

    Life struck them the severest blow of all - not just the death of a beloved child that ripped the heart from the family, but the death of a gifted child that ripped away their future hopes as well.

    "How can I only think about myself," queries Yingying to herself, "When having a happy and harmonious family is what I want the most? I need to make a lot of money and empower myself so I can take care of my family..." she revealed in her diary.

    Studying how climate change impacts on crop yields was only her first step toward becoming "an academic mogul and skilled teacher," she dreamed. The world is a big place - but she's strong, courageous and up to the challenge.

    "How big is the world? I want to measure the world with my feet!" she laughed in her diary.

    That same strength and courage made her fight for her life until the very end.

    Her abductor and murderer, who claimed to have killed 12 other people before being caught, who snuffed out Yingying's young life on a whim, said about her on secret FBI surveillance tapes, "She fought more than anyone else did... I couldn't believe it, she just didn't give up."

    Poignantly, director Shi revealed that she had also been lonely and homesick and found adapting to the language and culture in the United States an uphill battle. She, too, had waited alone at a bus stop and been offered a lift by a stranger. Since she'd seen him at a community police briefing earlier that evening, she did something she would normally never do.

    She got in his car. Fortunately, she arrived home safely.

    Yingying, who made the same mistake, did not.

    So Finding Yingying is Shi's homage to a young woman who, but for a random trick of fate, could have been her. When a viewer remarked that the film was so sad and asked her if there was hope in the film, Shi answered, "Yingying. She is our hope."

    She and Shilin Sun, her cinematographer, use deft, compelling camerawork, elegantly-crafted and slightly oblique, to bring Yingying's private world into soft focus and give the viewer an almost poetic perspective into her eager life and inner dreams.

    Shi is a master at capturing poignant little moments fraught with emotion: a slowly oscillating fan ineffective against the heat of the day, cluttered alleys choked with humanity, dishes broken in a moment of hopeless and rage, susurrating grasses in fields full of secrets, the impromptu, tender burial of a dying bird, the thousand-yard stare of Yingying's inconsolable mother as the voice of her well-meaning friend fades away...

    While a very personal film, Finding Yingying subtext carries with it a cautionary tale about the perils of globalism and an unflinching look at the yawning cultural and political divide between the US and China's criminal justice systems, bureaucracies, and cultural definitions of justice. It breaks her family's hearts when her self-confessed killer gets only life imprisonment, not the death penalty.

    The film has wider implications now, said producer Brent E. Huffman.

    "It breaks all kinds of stereotypes," explains Huffman. "The immigrant stereotype, the victim stereotype, the international student stereotype, and it has the potential to do a lot more than we ever imagined."

    Most Popular
    Top
    BACK TO THE TOP
    English
    Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site.
    License for publishing multimedia online 0108263

    Registration Number: 130349
    FOLLOW US
    亚洲久本草在线中文字幕| 中文字幕无码精品三级在线电影| 中文字幕51日韩视频| 中文字幕亚洲无线码a| 无码人妻精品一区二区三区99不卡 | 久久伊人中文无码| 日本妇人成熟免费中文字幕 | 在线综合亚洲中文精品| 中文字幕无码第1页| 中文国产成人精品久久亚洲精品AⅤ无码精品| 久久青青草原亚洲av无码app| 最近免费字幕中文大全| 亚洲Av无码乱码在线znlu| 无码国产乱人伦偷精品视频| 丰满岳乱妇在线观看中字无码| 欧美日韩久久中文字幕 | 国产日韩精品无码区免费专区国产| 亚洲中文久久精品无码| 伊人久久无码精品中文字幕| 中文字幕AV一区中文字幕天堂| 无码任你躁久久久久久| 日韩精品无码一本二本三本| 亚洲日韩精品A∨片无码| 日韩精品无码Av一区二区| 精品久久久久久无码专区不卡| www无码乱伦| 日韩精品中文字幕无码一区| 亚洲熟妇无码八AV在线播放 | 亚洲AV无码国产精品麻豆天美| 永久免费无码日韩视频| 人妻无码精品久久亚瑟影视| 亚洲日韩精品无码专区网站| AAA级久久久精品无码区| 波多野42部无码喷潮在线| 国产精品无码一区二区三级| 国产成A人亚洲精V品无码| 国产精品ⅴ无码大片在线看| YY111111少妇无码理论片| 久久久精品人妻无码专区不卡| 亚洲AV无码不卡在线观看下载| 中文字幕极速在线观看|