Jon StojanJinyang Li’s cinema doesn’t unfold — it drifts, like mist over still water, revealing its emotional depths only to those patient enough to sit with silence. Born in Chongqing, educated in Shanghai, and now crafting stories between two languages and cultures, Li is part of a growing wave of female filmmakers whose work resists spectacle in favor of sensation. Her award-winning short Back to the Lake, which received honors including Best Short Film and Best Experimental Film at international festivals, first introduced audiences to her signature style: restrained yet emotionally searing, intimate yet unafraid of ambiguity.
In her latest film EMBERS, Li continues this exploration, focusing on the small, private ruptures between women, generations, and selves. Her storytelling is layered, often nesting one narrative inside another, like memory folding into the present. Through quiet framing and an instinct for what should be left unsaid, she creates a cinematic language that feels as much like ink wash painting as it does film — delicate in surface, forceful underneath.
Image credit: Jinyang Li
In this conversation, she reflects on identity, form, and why she believes stories should haunt rather than conclude.
1. From Chongqing to Shanghai to the U.S.: How have these diverse environments shaped your perspective as a filmmaker?
Growing up in Chongqing, I was surrounded by a kind of raw emotional honesty. People say what they mean, and life feels urgent. Then I moved to Shanghai for college, where everything was faster, more globalized, and I became more self-conscious, more observant. Coming to the U.S. was another shift, one that made me even more introspective. It made me think more deeply about identity, language, and memory. I guess that’s why I gravitate toward stories that live in the in-between: the spaces between cultures, between generations, between what’s said and what’s unsaid.
2. Business Meets Art: How do these disciplines intersect in your creative process?
A lot more than people think. My business degree taught me how to structure a pitch, manage a budget, and think long-term, and also how to observe systems. I apply that lens to characters too: how they move through structures of family, tradition, or society. On set, it helps me plan strategically and think like a producer even when I’m directing.
3. Was there a specific experience or film that ignited your passion for storytelling?
I can’t name just one. But I remember watching Still Life by Jia Zhangke and feeling this ache in my chest, like someone had articulated something I didn’t even know I needed to express. That sense of quiet dislocation stayed with me. It wasn’t flashy. It was just true.
4. About EMBERS : Can you delve into the inspiration and journey behind your thesis film?
EMBERS began as a quiet meditation on memory. But over time, it became something more intimate. A story about intergenerational trauma, about how expectations pass down like heirlooms. Olivia, the main character, doesn’t rebel in any dramatic way. She retreats inward. That felt honest to me. This isn’t a story of breaking free, but of quiet erosion, the kind that leaves you hollow before you even notice it. That’s often what it feels like to be a daughter, especially within cultural structures that rarely name emotional distance or silent resentment.
Structurally, I’ve always been drawn to the nesting of reality and memory. I like writing one story on the surface, while gently revealing another underneath. It’s a bit like Borges, the way he uses the language of documentation to describe something imaginary. That’s how I approached EMBERS. The past and present fold into each other, not in sharp contrasts, but as reflections. Scenes aren’t just linear; they echo.
In fact, the whole film was written in service of a single emotional moment near the end. Once, there was a bonfire. Now, only embers remain. Eventually, all that’s left is the residual warmth inside an oven. That faint heat becomes their last shared comfort. And even that is slipping away. To me, this is what life feels like. A series of gatherings and partings, full of almosts. The warmth between people rarely burns forever. Often, we’re just holding on to the last trace of it.
Image credit: Jinyang Li
Image credit: Jinyang Li
5. Your narratives often dwell in emotional complexities. What draws you to these nuanced spaces?
Because they’re real. Conflict doesn’t always arrive in the form of yelling or betrayal. Sometimes it’s silence. Sometimes it’s years of pretending everything is fine. That’s the emotional terrain I’m drawn to, the kind of slow-burning tension that lives beneath quiet relationships. It’s subtle, but it lingers. And I think that’s often where the deepest pain hides.
6. How do you approach sensitive themes like trauma and memory without veering into sentimentality?
By grounding everything in detail. I’m not interested in trauma as spectacle. I’m interested in how it lingers. In photographs, in how someone packs a suitcase, in the things they can’t bring themselves to say. I focus on those small gestures instead of spelling everything out.
That’s also why I often choose a layered, nested structure in my storytelling. Sometimes the truth is too raw to face directly. Reality can be merciless, and memory doesn’t ask for permission. Most people look away, which is an effective defense mechanism. But as a filmmaker, I feel an obligation to keep looking. To dissect it, dress it in metaphor, and let its cruelty seep through the cracks in the frame. Not to shock, but to haunt.
7. How does your experience straddling Eastern and Western cultures influence your storytelling?
It makes me obsessed with context. I think every character is carrying the weight of where they came from, and I don’t mean just location, but also unspoken rules and inherited fears. Navigating both cultures taught me how much meaning can get lost in translation. So I try to write from that friction.
8. Do you find differences in storytelling when writing in Chinese versus English?
Absolutely. English tends to be more direct and linear. Chinese is looser, more elliptical. It allows for ambiguity, for poetic deflection. Sometimes I’ll write a scene in English, then translate it into Chinese just to see what gets lost or revealed in the process.
Every language has its untranslatable corners. Being able to work in both gives me something like extra limbs, a kind of sensory reach into spaces that one language alone can’t fully access. English offers clarity and structure, which is powerful for logic and pacing. But Chinese, with its looseness and abundance of imagery, taught me how language can dissolve into visual rhythm. That’s actually how I first began connecting words and images on a deeper level.
It’s something I think many English-language storytellers overlook. For example, Jane Austen is often read as a master of social realism, but she also wrote with rich symbolic layering. Ang Lee picked up on that and translate it cinematically. That kind of cross-linguistic resonance fascinates me.
I’ve come to think of language as a kind of limitation on thought. Once we speak, we’re already reducing the complexity of what we actually feel or know. It’s a form of dimensional compression. But at the same time, that’s what makes it meaningful. If we could communicate directly through pure thought, maybe it’d be too easy. Or too boring.
9. How do themes of belonging and identity manifest in your work?
In all the quiet ways. My characters often feel like they’re performing for the world, trying to belong without even knowing what that means anymore. There’s a loneliness in that. But also a strange kind of freedom, a space between definitions where something more honest can emerge.
I don’t set out to emphasize “identity” in my films. To me, identity is also a kind of shorthand. A label imposed by others who don’t fully understand. It simplifies what’s complex. And once something is spoken or categorized, it loses part of itself. That’s why I’m more interested in the tensions that emerge when identity is unstable or undefined.
The story of the Tower of Babel comes to mind. People were once united by language, but after the tower collapsed, everyone spoke in fragments. It’s a myth about division born from ambition. I think we’re still living in that aftermath，still struggling to understand each other across the noise.
What I aim for in my work is to reduce those rigid, one-sided narratives. In a perfect world, maybe fewer labels would mean fewer assumptions, and fewer assumptions would mean fewer conflicts. But that’s not the world we live in. So what I can do is let those fractures show. Not as statements, but as emotional surfaces. What appears on screen is just the form, the xiàng, the trace of something deeper.
10. Which filmmakers or artists have influenced your visual style?
I love the stillness of Edward Yang and the aching intimacy of Céline Sciamma. I’m also influenced by photographers, like Rinko Kawauchi. Her work makes the mundane feel sacred. That’s the kind of atmosphere I want in my films.
11. How does your background in editing inform your directorial choices?
It’s everything. I shoot for the edit. I know how a glance can hold more weight than a line of dialogue, so I give my actors space to breathe. Editing taught me restraint. To trust that silence can carry meaning.
12. Your recent work in script localization—how has this expanded your understanding of narrative and dialogue?
It’s made me more precise. Translating dialogue isn’t just about words. It’s about subtext. Cultural rhythm. Comedy. Emotional beats. It forced me to really listen to the music of a scene and match that energy across languages.
13. Do you see yourself as part of a lineage of female filmmakers, or forging a new path?
I think I exist slightly to the side of both. Of course, I’m grateful for the women who came before me and expanded the space for female voices in cinema. But I’m also wary of any fixed lineage, especially when it becomes another kind of label—another frame that tells you how you’re supposed to be seen.
14. Are there new themes or stories you’re eager to explore?
I’m drawn to things that resist clarity. I want to explore relationships where tenderness and violence are almost indistinguishable, where love can feel like protection one moment and possession the next. Mothers and daughters. Female friendships. The way emotional debt passes between women like a legacy no one asked for.
Immigration and class are part of that too, but I’m less interested in portraying them as sociological topics. I want to show how they quietly shape behavior, how they live in the silence between words, in what people don’t say at dinner.
Lately I’ve been thinking about telling a genre story. Something uncanny, intimate, maybe even a little brutal, but not loud.
15. Where do you envision your career and storytelling journey in the next five years?
Right now, I’m working on scripts that are highly commercial, fast-paced, and deeply engineered to meet certain emotional needs. It’s a different rhythm than the kind of work I used to do, but I’m starting to understand the pulse of the market, and the instincts of mass audiences. There’s actually a lot to learn from that.
New genres and story structures are emerging every day through web fiction and serialized content. But the speed of adaptation that turns those stories into film or television can’t keep up with how quickly they’re being created. So I see this gap as both a challenge and an opportunity. It’s forcing me to get more familiar with narrative momentum, with tempo, with the mechanics of storytelling at scale.
If I keep moving, keep absorbing, I trust that the right story will find its shape through me. Not through force, but through readiness. And when that happens, I want to be prepared. I want to be the kind of storyteller who’s not just skilled, but clear. Clear about what I want to leave behind.
So five years from now, I don’t just want to be making something personal. I want to be making something I couldn’t have written any earlier. Because only then would it be honest.