JET LAG: SCREENING introduction by ALICE BUTLER

Thanks so much to Marie-Pierre and Maria from East Asia Film Festival Ireland for the invitation to introduce this film. 

Through our work with aemi we are in the very fortunate position of regularly encountering moving image work that experiments with and expands the possibilities of film as an artform. 

That said, as an organisation we are deeply aware, now more than ever, that because of a number of factors including infrastructural and systemic biases that always prioritise western cinema, there are certain voices and cultures within experimental film practice that we encounter more than others. 

Because of that we are really excited to see the important work that Maria and Marie-Pierre are doing to bring the rich and varied area of practice from East Asia to the attention of audiences here. And we’re doubly excited to have this chance to work with the festival to deepen our own understanding of this work and to have the means through which to familiarise ourselves with new artists and filmmakers like Zheng Lu Xinyuan who are innovating new approaches to the medium in ways that are as political as they are personal. 

I was not aware of Zheng Lu Xinyuan before the festival contacted us about Jet Lag but since watching her film and speaking to her about it, I have been deeply affected by her work. 

Xinyuan is a young filmmaker, born in 1991 and living at the moment in Hangzhou, China. She completed a masters degree in film production in Los Angeles in 2017 and has received widespread acclaim for her work since her first autobiographical feature The Cloud in Her Room won the Tiger Prize at Rotterdam International Film Festival in 2020, an award which and I quote ‘celebrates the adventurous spirit of up-and-coming filmmakers from all over the world’ and which has been given in the past to brilliant filmmaking voices like Kelly Reichardt and Anocha Suwichakornpong (whose work featured in last year’s East Asia Film Festival). 

Since 2020 her work has shown at MoMa in New York and the Forum Section at Berlinale, all significant indications of the way her work has so successfully travelled and resonated with audiences internationally, outside of her native China, a country whose culture and politics Xinyuan tells us a great deal about in her work both directly and implicitly. 

Jet Lag is Xinyuan’s second feature and it is a remarkable achievement, weaving as it does a variety of strands that all ultimately speak to states of dissonance, dislocation and alienation. Like a lot of great experimental cinema there is a traceable narrative or story in this film but it just isn’t handed to us in the way we might expect. 

The project started as a desire of Xinyuan’s to document a family trip made to Myanmar in 2018 to attend a distant relative’s wedding but more importantly to support Xinyuan’s grandmother as she tries to gain an understanding of the life her father led after he left her in China as a 5 year old child to emigrate to Myanmar after which they would only meet one more time before his death. 

This footage of this trip and the story it tells however acquires new meaning or significance as the world shut down in early 2020 when Xinyuan found herself stuck with her girlfriend in an apartment in Graz, Austria for much of the first European lockdown. In these scenes their relationship and the intimate stories they tell each other about their lives attest to that already strange and seemingly remote past when life was restricted to domestic space and social contact limited to our partners, families or closest friends, if anyone at all. 

In these moments Xinyuan’s girlfriend tearfully shares details of her traumatic childhood and in particular, her fear of her volatile father, which foreshadows a key scene which takes place much later on in the film between Xinyuan and her own father and which speaks volumes about the kind of attitude Xinyuan has to what she feels are outmoded ideas about family, family relationships and patriarchal structures but also about her intrepid commitment to her role as filmmaker. 

There is much else in this film besides not least of which is Xinyuan’s deft and intuitive approach to pattern, texture and abstraction, all of which is woven together with edits so skilful and imaginative it takes a breath before what has happened can sometimes be discerned. Such is the beauty and distinction of Xinyuan’s cinema which I hope you’ll all enjoy. 

Alice Butler, co-director of aemi

[aemi is an Arts Council-funded organisation that supports and regularly exhibits moving image work by artists and experimental filmmakers – www.aemi.ie]