Early 2020, the sudden covid-19 outbreak stranded the director and her girlfriend Zoe in Austria. Enduring the lock-down, they dug into the family mystery of Zheng’s Great Grandpa through a VHS tape and footage that she shot 2 years back in Myanmar.
Spring 2018, Grandma and our family were invited to Mandalay to attend a distant relative’s wed-ding. In between attending the banquets and sightseeing, Grandma was eager to find out more about her missing father, who left China when she was five and became a Monk later in his life.
After multiple flight cancellations, my girlfriend Zoe and I made our way back home. We visited Grandma together. I came to realize that Grandma, Zoe and I were all experiencing the absence of fatherhood for different reasons.
In February 2021, a military coup took place in Myanmar. All of a sudden, Myanmar again became a place that is so close and far away at the same time.
Zheng Lu Xinyuan is a filmmaker based in Hangzhou, China. She graduated from School of Cinematic Arts, USC with a Film Production MFA in 2017. Her first feature The Cloud in Her Room won the Tiger Award at Rotterdam International Film Festival in 2020. Her short films were selected to screen at festivals such as Tribeca Film Fes-tival, FIRST International Film Festival, Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture and China Independent Film Festival. Xinyuan cultivates a personal visual practice that explores the boundaries of various media as well as of articulation itself.
Grandmother Wenqin Lin
Girlfriend Zoe
Myself Zheng Lu Xinyuan
Mother Coco Lu
Great Grandfather Yucang Lin
English Study Group Member Fu Su, Chen A San, Zhu Kula
Director Zheng Lu Xinyuan
Producer Ray Matin, Shanshan Li
Cinematography Zheng Lu Xinyuan, Zoe
Editors Zheng Lu Xinyuan, Xinzhu Liu
Sound Designer Kun Lou, Clark Zhao
Music Tseng Yun-Fang
Colorist Fu Shu
Berlin International Film Festival
Forum
MoMA Doc Fortnight
Hot Docs Festival
Markers