Zheng Lu Xinyuan is a filmmaker based in Hangzhou, China. She graduated from the USC School of Cinematic Arts in Los Angeles in 2017 with a Master's degree in Film Production. Her short films have been screened in many festivals such as Tribeca Film Festival and FIRST International Film Festival. His first feature film, The Cloud in Her Room, won the Tiger Award at the 2020 Rotterdam Film Festival. Jet Lag premiered at the Berlinale Forum in 2022.
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Jet Lag is the tale of two journeys: the first one is a journey through time, in search of a great-grandfather who disappeared in Burma in the 40s, the second one is the director’s journey between Austria, where she got stuck during the pandemic, and her slow return to China and to her parents. Her 2021 film, The Cloud in Her Room, already tapped into the family unit–trampling it to later shake it up–to find an endless for storytelling. Jet Lag plows this furrow and tackles it as a video diary enforcing strictly, as a condition to its dialogue with the audience (and maybe the director’s relatives) a staunch, radical stance. Borders are blurred in Zheng Lu Xinyuan’s diary, structured as a series of impressions that follows our memory lapses: Beijing, devoid of any residents, borders on Burma four years earlier, and the same faint, mournful tune eventually emanates from both locations. The whole film is coated in gentle black and white, thus emphasizing the rainy nights of a world that has stopped, but is by no means devoid of light. As she turns her back to her family past that she distances herself from, Zheng Lu Xinyuan had rather outline the urge that drives her, this desire to build a community. And she finds that words are a precious tool towards it; speech can break our inertia, and even help a whole country rise up.
Vincent Poli
