Just weeks after arriving in the United States, a 26-year-old visiting scholar from a small city in southern China disappeared from her Illinois campus. Two years later, in the summer of 2019, her suspected kidnapper went on trial. “Finding Yingying” traces those two years from the anguished perspective of the young woman’s family, fiancé and friends — and from the point of view of director Shi Jiayan, who didn’t know Zhang Yingying but whose identification with her lends the documentary its thoughtful and haunting tone.

Shi’s film — which received a special SXSW jury prize for breakthrough voice — is a sensitively told true-crime story. It’s much more than that too, grappling with matters of tradition, ambition, familial bonds and cultural disparities, and peering through the wider lens of the global economy, and the revenue that 300,000-plus Chinese students bring to U.S. colleges every year.

During the events chronicled in this compelling film, one of the largest concentrations of those students was at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where Zhang researched the effects of climate change on crops and dreamt of life as an “academic mogul” and a mother, before she got in the wrong stranger’s car.

Like Zhang, the filmmaker attended Peking University and eventually moved to Illinois. She was a journalism student there in June 2017 when she heard of Zhang’s disappearance, and became one of many volunteers involved in the search for her. She also began chronicling that search from the point of view of the Zhangs, working people who made the long trip to a country where they didn’t speak the language and embarked on a hopeful but guarded “needle in the ocean” quest to find Yingying.

At key points in her fluent mix of talking-head interviews, drone footage, surveillance video and family photos, the director overlays excerpts from Zhang’s handwritten diaries. She reads these excerpts, translated into English — a voiceover narration that underscores the kinship she feels. “You look like my daughter,” Zhang’s mother tells Shi, her gaze burning with gratitude but also a grief so crushing it’s almost accusatory.

Zhang isn’t reduced to mere victim; her diligence, drive and vulnerability come through loud and clear. Her writing reveals a vibrant intelligence and curiosity, as well as a self-discipline that could be intense. The ache of loneliness courses through all the hard work and big plans, the loneliness of someone who’s on her own in a foreign country.

“Finding Yingying” is also a deft portrait of a family on the razor’s edge between hope and dread.

The unfolding investigation is presented with a level of suspense that’s involving and never exploitive. During the long delay between the suspect’s arrest and the trial, Shi visits the Zhangs in their hometown Nanping and finds an inconsolable mother, a father struggling with guilt, a severely strained marriage and a heartbroken younger brother. The vagaries and machinations of the American legal system baffle and anger the Zhangs, and the trial itself brings harrowing revelations.(SD-Agencies)