21/02/2022 - BERLINALE 2022: In her hybrid documentary-video essay, Zhen Lu Xinyuan searches for parallels between her COVID-19 isolation and her family’s tracing of their roots

It is hard to pinpoint a narrative theme in Zhen Lu Xinyuan’s Jet Lag [+see also:
trailer
film profile], but if one tried, it would be a sense of isolation and abandonment. Premiering in the Forum section at the Berlinale, this part documentary, part video essay film follows Xinyuan and her family throughout two major trips: one deals with a world in shutdown after COVID-19 hit in 2020, while the other chronicles her family’s trip to Myanmar, where the director’s great-grandfather disappeared in the 40s.

“There is no main character,” Xinyuan’s girlfriend correctly observes at the beginning of the movie. But then again, how could there be? This is not the story of one single person. It is as much an individual trauma as it is a generational one whose surface the director keeps trying to scratch away. Shot with a simple, old school DV camera in black and white, the look of the film reminds one of a video diary. But there is a specific gaze to Xinyuan’s craft, as she locks in the banality of COVID-19 decreed isolation, and the forlorn feeling of the family trip, as her grandmother traces the footsteps of the father whom she could never let go of.

Absent, violent or even disinterested fathers are a recurring connection between the characters. The internal isolation these experiences may have caused Xinyuan, her girlfriend and her grandma slowly start shifting externally. Starting the movie in April 2020 in a small apartment in Graz, Austria, Xinyuan and her companion are stranded in the city, with no flights taking her home to Hangzhou in China. A recurring phone screen shows how every flight keeps getting delayed or cancelled. The world is now only available on Google Maps.

The women start passing their time by observing the few pedestrians still moving along the streets of their neighbourhood. Delivery services, essential workers are documented with a secretive, longing eye. The triviality of life in a confined space as well as its intimacy bleed through every frame. Back in China, the use of hazmat suits by health workers may already seem like a page out of a dystopian novel. The next thing you know, Xinyuan and her partner are again confined to a quarantine hotel, with white suits covering their doors completely in duct tape.

These scenes are intercut with a prior trip by the family to Myanmar. The director purposefully lets these scenes bleed into each other, making the viewer guess the timeline, or choosing to just go along with its agitated yet lethargic feel. A distant cousin is getting married. He is a part of the family which, as it turns out, stayed in contact with the great-grandfather. Between the wedding and sightseeing, the family looks for the last traces of the man who has become a glorified and hated enigma to them. For clues as to why he did what he did. He is the father figure that grandma can’t help but still look up to.

Some, however, oppose this research. “Trivial matters,” cousin Lin calls it. The idea of who this man was should be enough, there is little to obtain from uncovering his life. And so Xinyuan’s gaze ultimately shifts to Myanmar itself, its historic entrenchment in civil wars and the Spring Revolution that followed the latest military coup. Talking to a cousin, played for security reasons by an actress with the use of AI tech, the young woman champions introducing democracy to the country and promoting the protests in the street.

Jet lag usually leaves a person lethargic due to the body’s need to adapt to a new rhythm. Xinyuan may feel this physically due to her time zone spanning trip from Europe to Asia. But there is also a shift in the family, in how it deals with its own past and the present. The body in one place, the soul in another, an effort to make sense of what came and what is. A lethargic feeling, a jet lag of the mind.

Jet Lag was produced by Ray Matin and Shanshan Li. International sales are handled by Rediance.