“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 last 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 disappeared June 9, 2017 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign campus.

Shi, together with producers Brent E. Huffman and Diane Moy Quon, brought Yingying’s story to the screen.

The documentary follows the Zhang family for more than two years as they seek justice for their daughter in a foreign land. Incorporating local news footage, haunting readings of Zhang’s diary, and talking-head interviews as the case was unfolding, the film is a moving portrait of grief, family, and cultural alienation in both China and the United States. The documentary was set to have its world premiere at the SXSW Film Festival in March before the festival was canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The Hollywood Reporter described the film as “a deft portrait of a family on the razor’s edge between hope and dread;” IndieWire saw it as “handcrafted and haunting;” while a Rotten Tomatoes critic said 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,” said 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 disturbing disappearance.

Shi said after the premier that unlike other true crime documentaries, she intended “Finding Ying-ying” to be “a film about Yingying’s beautiful life and the impact she had on others.”

Shi brings Yingying to life as a vibrant, curious and driven young woman who thrilled to 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 the while struggling to overcome feelings of homesickness and loneliness over 10,000 kilometers from home.

In short, she was an extraordinary young woman with a promising future 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 access behind-the-scenes with 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 search and investigation drag on and hope slowly dies.

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.

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.

While a very personal film, “Finding Yingying” subtext carries with it a cautionary tale about the perils of globalism and an unflinching look at the yawning cultural and political divide between the U.S. and China’s criminal justice systems, bureaucracies, and cultural definitions of justice. It breaks her family’s hearts when her self-confessed killer gets only life imprisonment, not the death penalty.

The film has wider implications now, said producer Brent E. Huffman.

“It breaks all kinds of stereotypes,” explains Huffman. “The immigrant stereotype, the victim stereotype, the international student stereotype, and it has the potential to do a lot more than we ever imagined.” (Xinhua)