Jia
2020 · 10m · Canada
Directed by Weiye Su
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A young Chinese-Canadian couple visiting family in Wuhan as the pandemic is declared reflects on jia, the idea of family and home, under sudden lockdown conditions.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a pandemic lockdown film about family, which sounds like every other soggy indie meditation from 2020—except Su uses the essay form to dodge sentiment entirely, letting the concept of *jia* do the philosophical heavy lifting instead of reaching for the easy emotional beat.
Su positions this squarely in the essayistic tradition of personal documentary—Agnès Varda, Chantal Akerman—where domestic constraint becomes a lens for examining language, belonging, and the distance between lived experience and inherited meaning; the restraint is deliberate and rigorous.
The decision to let the couple's conversations about what *jia* means sit unresolved, layered against archival and intimate footage, is what transforms this from diary into something crystalline—it's a formal choice that trusts the viewer to hold contradictions instead of smoothing them into narrative.