A loving portrait of a young woman robbed of her bright future, “Finding Yingying” also serves as an indictment of the true crime genre, which all too often treats victims of violent crimes as little more than anonymous supporting characters in their killer’s story. First-time director Jiayan “Jenny” Shi puts Yingying Zhang and her family at the center of her doc about 26-year-old Yingying’s disappearance. The Chinese visiting scholar had been in the United States less than two months when she went missing from her Illinois campus.
“When we think about a case like this, the media is likely to focus on the crime, investigation, or the perpetrator. They forget about the people left behind in the tragedy — and the person labeled only as the ‘victim’ becomes dehumanized,” Shi told us.
With “Finding Yingying,” Shi wanted to tell the story of “a brilliant young woman, who is loved by her family and friends, a story of her grieving family trying to stay strong and find her while navigating a strange, foreign country.” She celebrates the physics graduate student’s intelligence, ambition, and optimism, the shared love between Yingying and her boyfriend back in China, and Yingying’s close bond with her family.
Though they didn’t know one another personally, Shi and Yingying both attended Peking University in China. Shi happened to be studying as an international student just hours away from where Yingying disappeared. “Yingying and I are almost the same age and shared similar experiences,” Shi explained in our conversation with her. “The more time I spent with Yingying’s family, the more I thought about my own parents. I knew how devastated they would have been if this had happened to me, and I knew how much a Chinese family has to give up to send their children abroad for a better future. Yingying and her family’s story resonated with me a lot.”
Shi’s close connection to Yingying, and her decision to include voiceovers of herself reading Yingying’s diary entries, makes for a radically personal and powerful documentary, and one that makes a compelling case for telling more nuanced stories about the people who are left behind — and lost — in headline-making tragedies.
“Finding Yingying” is now in virtual cinemas.
