Finding Yingying highlights grief and love
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 Zhang Yingying, who vanished on June 9, 2017 from the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign campus.
Shi, together with producers Brent E. Huffman and Diane Moy Quon, brought Yingying’s story to the screen.
The Hollywood Reporter describes the film as “a deft portrait of a family on the razor’s edge between hope and dread”; IndieWire sees it as “handcrafted and haunting”; while a Rotten Tomatoes critic says 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,” says 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 disappearance.
Shi says after the premier 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 person who ended her life, but around Yingying herself.
Instead, Shi brings Yingying to life as a vibrant, curious and driven young woman who thrilled at 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 while struggling to overcome feelings of homesickness and the loneliness of living more than 10,000 kilometers from home.
In short, she was an extraordinary young woman with a promising future who was 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 behind- the- scenes access to
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 investigation drags on and hope slowly fades.
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 tore 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.
Another entry reads, “How big is the world? I want to measure the world with my feet!”
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.”
Finding Yingying is Shi’s homage to a young woman who, but for a random twist 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 Sun Shilin, 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.
The film has wider implications now, says producer Brent E. Huffman.
“It breaks all kinds of stereotypes,” he explains. “The immigrant stereotype, the victim stereotype, the international student stereotype, and it has the potential to do a lot more than we ever imagined.”