Shanghai Fire (2019)

Set against the city outskirts surrounding Shanghai's International airport, a young woman kills time between flights at a hotel where her boredom is soon disrupted by a TV news report about the tragic Woolsey Fires in California, where she lives. Without a VPN and unable to use her smartphone, she desperately tries to communicate with her husband through landlines, broken English and sloppy Chinese, only to find out that her house was indeed affected but most importantly her cat is lost. Angry, sad, and frustrated at the prospect of her best friend's death, our protagonist goes through accelerated stages of grief in the twelve hours preceding her flight back to LAX. Wandering around Shanghai, she cries, goes dancing, and gets drunk, finally ritualising her pain in an improvised late night fire ceremony which reveals to us that even though an ocean away, she's hopelessly trying to feel closer to home.