Bye bye, nai nai

Dear grandma, you passed away yesterday. The things I want to tell you, I don’t know how. Who will take care of your flowers now?

Filmmaker Weina Zhao returns to China after the death of her grandmother. In the face of this loss, she translates her speechlessness and the glimmer of her sorrow into a letter – a filmic letter whose words, spoken and written, are superimposed on scenes of everyday life and a farewell.  

The audience learns almost nothing about nai nai’s life, yet sense her absence everywhere: in the brightly lit metropolis beyond the taxi window, among her abandoned plants, in the funeral procession amidst closely packed graves and colorful plastic flowers. We see an urn in a sports bag, photos in a display case, waterfowl against a hilly landscape. And yet, at the same time this film manages to show, in just a few minutes, what we cannot actually see.  

Weina Zhao, born in Beijing but raised in Vienna, not only documents the loss of her grandmother in Bye bye, nai nai, but also lays bare the wound of diaspora: the heaviness of distance, the question of belonging, the constant longing in all directions – these are the underlying themes in all the images. Against this backdrop, questions arise that have no clear answers: Can we rely on our memories? What is nai nai’s fate in Western Heaven? And is grief just another language that one must learn to speak? (Lin Hierse)