Jet Lag

April 2020: during a global lockdown, stranded in Graz with her girlfriend Zoe, filmmaker Zheng Lu Xinyuan chronicles an arduous trip home to China. Images of empty airports and quarantine hotels spark memories of an earlier journey to Myanmar with her grandmother in search of traces of her great-grandfather, who went missing in the 1940s. As the grand old matriarch poignantly searches for her absent father, the young filmmaker tries to understand something mysterious about her grandmother before she is gone. Shot on ravishing DV, the film moves between its disparate times and places with a perambulating logic; a travelogue of quarantine and a family journey that draws lines between Graz, China and Myanmar as well as intimacy, memory and diaspora.