In Jet Lag, presented at the 2022 Berlinale Forum, Zheng Lu Xinyuan documents her family history before, during, and after the pandemic, leading to a blurred and intimate expression of one’s self.
Presented in the Berlinale Forum selection of the 2022 Berlin International Film Festival, running from February 10th to February 20th in Germany, Zheng Lu Xinyuan’s Jet Lag follows up her autobiographical Golden Tiger winner The Cloud in Her Room with a personal documentary on her family history and the pandemic, topically titled Jet Lag. Shot on multiple photographic and video formats, Zheng puts herself behind the camera and occasionally in front to document her journey to discover the past of her family’s background, with her great grandpa as the object that reveals all. Presented in black and white, Zheng intimately describes her family history in various depictions. Whether it be alone in her room, describing her parent’s divorce, or our on the street filming her relatives and herself, Zheng opens herself up through the lens of the camera for a portrait of herself and family.
The beginning of the film revolves around a trip to Myanmar where she joins her mother, aunts, and other members of her family for a distant family member’s wedding. While filming her relative’s wedding, Zheng documents of her time around Myanmar and discusses family background, who is who in her family at the wedding. Acting as her own camera person, she films these moments with her family that shows the progression of time, especially the inevitable pandemic. With this trip lasting eight days, she sightsees across Myanmar, while learning of her great grandfather’s (mother’s father) past who passed away about 20 years ago and his leave of family in the 1940s to Myanmar. They visit her grandfather’s old home, looking at old photos, discovering new and old moments where Zheng feels ultimately connected with.
Zheng interweaves her footage with archival footage of Myanmar in past, comparing the present with the past. She dives deeper into her great grandfather’s background of Buddhism and spirituality during her trip in Myanmar. As the film progresses, she intercuts it with her private life in her apartment in Hangzhou with her partner where it begins to show the surroundings around her. As the streets begin to clear and showing empty parking lots, the sense of time is lost, and the pandemic is now imminent. The non-linear structure of showing airports with people in hazmat suits after filming herself in her bathtub alone creates the anxious world that is currently taking place and Zheng’s process of it all, family and home.
Jet Lag takes its time with the story. Its dizziness structure sets into a place going back and forth between the past and present. The same can be said about China and Myanmar’s past. With discussion taking place of how Myanmar and China’s reveal her family’s past, Zheng allows the camera and her secretive filmmaking to expose truths that she would want to reveal. As she documents the pre and post trip for this Myanmar trip, Zheng’s reveals the influence of the trip she had just came from had her own upbringing, and having previously watched her previous film, The Cloud in Her Room, one can’t help how Jet Lag can make The Cloud in Her Room even more impactful. Near the end, she documents a moment, with her father, where an anxious and frustrating moment occurs between the two that reveal much more than what is said between the two, in one of the film’s best scenes. Although the film’s fragmented look in Zheng’s life may seem messy, the haziness and feeling of Jet Lag might be the most appropriate term of her family history.
