Missing Persons

Subterms

    Latest story

    100 Shares149 Views

    Cole Brings Plenty, ’1923’ Actor, Is Found Dead

    by

    Mr. Brings Plenty, 27, was found dead in Kansas days after his family reported him missing. Officials did not provide a cause of death.Cole Brings Plenty, an actor in the television series “1923,” was found dead on Friday in Kansas after his family reported him missing earlier in the week, officials said.The Johnson County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement that its deputies had found Mr. Brings Plenty, 27, in a wooded area in Johnson County, which borders Missouri.The deputies had been responding to a report of an unoccupied vehicle and found him dead in an area away from it, the statement said. The office did not provide a cause of death.Mr. Brings Plenty, who identified himself as Mnicoujou Lakota on Instagram, played Pete Plenty Clouds, a Native American sheepherder, in the television show “1923,” a prequel to “Yellowstone.” The show depicts abuse toward Native American children in boarding schools established or supported by the government.In May 2023, Mr. Brings Plenty and his uncle Mo Brings Plenty visited the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs in Washington to talk about the boarding schools and other issues affecting Native Americans.Mr. Brings Plenty’s acting credits also include the Western television shows “Into the Wild Frontier” and “The Tall Tales of Jim Bridger,” according to IMDb, the entertainment database. He was a student at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kan.Mr. Brings Plenty’s father, Joe Brings Plenty Sr., confirmed his son’s death in a statement shared by a family spokeswoman, Michelle Shining Elk.“We would also like to thank everyone who came to walk beside us as we searched for my son and provided the resources we needed to expand our search areas,” Mr. Brings Plenty Sr. said in the statement.Mo Brings Plenty shared a missing person’s poster on social media that said his nephew went missing on March 31 and had missed an appointment with his agent, which was “uncharacteristic.”The poster said that Mr. Brings Plenty had last been seen in Lawrence, Kan.The Lawrence Police Department said in a statement that it had submitted an affidavit for the arrest of Mr. Brings Plenty after the police identified him as a suspect in a case of domestic violence that happened on the morning of March 31.The police said that officers had responded to a woman screaming for help in an apartment in Lawrence and that the suspect had fled before officers arrived.“This incident involves allegations of domestic violence, which limits the amount of information we can share to protect the victim,” the statement said.The police said that Mr. Brings Plenty’s family had contacted them, expressed concern and reported him as a missing person. Mr. Brings Plenty was found about 28 miles southeast of Lawrence. More

    More stories

    • 125 Shares109 Views

      in Music

      Former Mr. Bungle Saxophonist, Theo Lengyel, Charged With Girlfriend’s Murder

      by

      Theobald Lengyel, a saxophonist, helped form the experimental rock band in Northern California in the mid-1980s. His girlfriend had been missing since early December.A founding member of the experimental 1990s rock band Mr. Bungle, Theobald Lengyel, was arrested on Tuesday and charged with murder, after the police in Capitola, Calif., found human remains that they believed were his girlfriend’s in a wooded area of a regional park.Mr. Lengyel’s girlfriend, Alice Kamakaokalani Herrmann, 61, who was known as Alyx, was last seen in Santa Cruz, Calif., on Dec. 3, according to the El Cerrito Police Department. After not hearing from her for more than a week, her family reported her missing on Dec. 12, the police said.Ms. Kamakaokalani had lived in Capitola, a small seaside town in Santa Cruz County. The police said in a statement that during their investigation they found her car, a red Toyota Highlander SUV, at Mr. Lengyel’s house in El Cerrito, about an hour and 40 minutes by car from Capitola. Investigators found remains, which are still being identified, in Tilden Regional Park in Berkeley, the police said.Mr. Lengyel’s girlfriend, Alice Kamakaokalani Herrmann, had been missing since early December.El Cerrito Police Department“As the investigation progressed, it became clear that foul play was involved,” the Capitola Police Department said in a statement, “leading to the identification of Theobald Lengyel as a suspect.”Mr. Lengyel, 54, who has also released music under the name Mylo Stone, has not cooperated with the investigation, according to the El Cerrito Police Department, which said they believed Mr. Lengyel had left town and drove to Portland, Ore., after Ms. Kamakaokalani’s disappearance.Mr. Lengyel, who played the alto saxophone, was one of the founding members of Mr. Bungle, which formed in the mid-1980s in Northern California as a metal band before embarking on a more experimental, absurdist path. The band released its first album, also named “Mr. Bungle,” in 1991.The album, which included a mixture of progressive rock, punk and funk, featured song titles like “Squeeze Me Macaroni” and “The Girls of Porn.” Allmusic.com described it as “a difficult, not very accessible record,” but noted that “the band wouldn’t have it any other way.”Mr. Lengyel left the band in the late 1990s, before the release of the album “California.” The band reunited and performed in Los Angeles in 2020, without Mr. Lengyel. More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      Julian Sands Confirmed Dead After Remains Found on California’s Mount Baldy

      by

      The British actor was reported missing in January after he went hiking alone on a trail on Mount Baldy. Last weekend, after months of intense searches, hikers found human remains in the area.Human remains that were found on Saturday in the Southern California wilderness have been identified as those of the British actor Julian Sands, who had been missing since January after he went hiking in the area, the authorities said on Tuesday.The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department said in a statement that the remains had been “positively identified” as those of Mr. Sands, and that the cause of death remained under investigation “pending further test results.”Mr. Sands, 65, of North Hollywood, was an avid hiker and was best known for his role in the critically acclaimed 1986 film “A Room With a View.” The film, an adaptation of the novel by E.M. Forster, regularly makes lists as one of the best British films of all time.He also appeared in dozens of other films and television shows, including “Arachnophobia,” “Naked Lunch,” “Warlock” and “Ocean’s Thirteen.”Hikers found the remains Saturday morning in the Mount Baldy area, which is more than 40 miles northeast of Los Angeles, the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department said.Mr. Sands, who had a wife and three children, was reported missing in January after he went hiking alone on a trail on Mount Baldy. On hiking websites, the popular trek is described as challenging and strenuous.Search crews had been combing the area looking for Mr. Sands for months despite their efforts being complicated by dangerous conditions, including heavy rain and snow, some of which lingered into June.In an update on the search on June 17, the sheriff’s department said that parts of the mountain could still not be reached because of “extreme alpine conditions,” including steep terrain and ravines covered in more than 10 feet of ice and snow.More than 80 search-and-rescue volunteers, deputies and staff members participated in the search that day. Two helicopters and drone crews were used to check areas inaccessible to searchers on the ground, the sheriff’s department said.The sheriff’s department had carried out eight searches for Mr. Sands since January, the authorities said, with volunteers looking for more than 500 hours. At the same time, eight other unrelated search-and-rescue operations were also conducted in the region.Mr. Sands often spoke of his fondness for nature and said in a 2020 interview with The Guardian that he was happiest when close to a mountain summit on a cold morning.In another interview that same year with Thrive Global, a health and wellness company started by Arianna Huffington, he said he had spent time in mountain ranges in North America and Europe.Mr. Sands said that people who did not climb mountains assumed it was about ego and a “great heroic sprint” to the summit.“But actually, it’s the reverse,” he said. “It’s about supplication and sacrifice and humility, when you go to these mountains. It’s not so much a celebration of oneself, but the eradication of one’s self-consciousness. And so on these walks you lose yourself, you become a vessel of energy in harmony, hopefully with your environment.”Lauren McCarthy More

    • 125 Shares139 Views

      in Music

      When Connie Converse, the ‘Female Bob Dylan,’ Lived in N.Y.C.

      by

      There’s a resurgence of interest in the pioneering singer-songwriter who disappeared when she was 50.Connie Converse was a pioneer of what’s become known as the singer-songwriter era, making music in the predawn of a movement that had its roots in the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early 1960s.But her songs, created a decade earlier, arrived just a moment too soon. They didn’t catch on. And by the time the sun had come up in the form of a young Bob Dylan, she was already gone. Not simply retired. She had vanished from New York City, as she eventually would from the world, along with her music and legacy.It wasn’t until 2004, when an N.Y.U. graduate student heard a 1954 bootleg recording of Ms. Converse on WNYC, that her music started to get any of the attention and respect that had evaded her some 50 years before.The student, Dan Dzula, and his friend, David Herman, were spellbound by what they heard. They dug up more archival recordings, and assembled the 2009 album, “How Sad, How Lovely,” a compilation of songs that sound as though they could have been written today. It has been streamed over 16 million times on Spotify.Young musicians like Angel Olsen and Greta Kline now cite Ms. Converse as an influence, and musical acts from Big Thief to Laurie Anderson to the opera singer Julia Bullock have covered her songs.“She was the female Bob Dylan,” Ellen Stekert, a singer, folk music scholar and song collector told me during my research for a book about Ms. Converse. “She was even better than him, as a lyricist and composer, but she didn’t have his showbiz savvy, and she wasn’t interested in writing protest songs.”Seventy-five years ago, Ms. Converse was just another young artist trying to make ends meet in the city, singing at dinner parties and private salons, and passing a hat for her performances.She knew that her songs did not jibe with the saccharine pop of the day. “This type of thing always curdles me like a dentist’s appointment,” she wrote to her brother before an audition at Frank Loesser’s music publishing company, where she predicted what executives would say of her songs: “lovely, but not commercial.”In January 1961, the same month that Dylan arrived from the Midwest, Ms. Converse left New York for Ann Arbor, Mich., where she reinvented herself as an editor, a scholar and an activist.In 1974, a week after her 50th birthday, she disappeared and was never seen again.Ms. Converse lived in New York from 1945 to 1960, and though she was intensely private, she kept a diary, scrapbooks and voluminous correspondence that were left behind after she drove away for good, offering clues about what the Manhattan chapter of her life was like. Here are some of the neighborhoods, venues and sites around the city that provided the musician with a backdrop for her short but trailblazing stint as a songwriter.The 1940s: Bohemians of the Upper West SideRiverside ParkIn 1944, after dropping out of Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, Ms. Converse moved to New York. Her first job was at the American Institute of Pacific Relations, where she edited and wrote articles about international affairs. “I am struck by the breadth of the topics she covered,” said the contemporary international relations scholar Michael R. Anderson, who calls her writing and reporting “remarkable.”She lived on the Upper West Side. The image of her in Riverside Park, above, was found in an old filing cabinet that belonged to the photographer’s widow. It is one of the first known images of Ms. Converse in New York.The Lincoln ArcadeMs. Converse, left, plays for friends at the Lincoln Arcade.Lois AimeSome of Ms. Converse’s closest friends lived and hung around the bohemian enclave known as the Lincoln Arcade, a building on Broadway between West 65th and 66th Street. With a reputation as a haven for struggling artists, it had been home to the painters Robert Henri, Thomas Hart Benton and George Bellows, the last of whom had lived there with the playwright Eugene O’Neill.The group was a hard-drinking lot, given to holding court late at night. One surviving member of that crew, Edwin Bock, told me that Ms. Converse would often be clattering away at a typewriter, at a remove from the rest, though sometimes she did things he found shocking, like climbing out the front window well past midnight to stand on a ledge, several stories above the street.The 1950s: Making Music in the Village and Beyond23 Grove StreetPhotographs from Ms. Converse’s scrapbook show her studio apartment at 23 Grove Street, where she wrote almost all of her “guitar song” catalog.The Musick Group, Heroic Cities LLCMs. Converse lost her job when the institute landed in the cross hairs of the anti-Communist House Un-American Activities Committee. Sometime late in 1950, she moved to the West Village and began a new phase of her life as an aspiring composer and performer.She bought a Crestwood 404 reel-to-reel tape recorder and began making demos of herself singing new songs as she wrote them. It was here, while living alone in a studio apartment at 23 Grove Street that Ms. Converse wrote almost all of her “guitar song” catalog (including everything on “How Sad, How Lovely”).The Village at that time “was the Left Bank of Manhattan,” the writer Gay Talese told me, and it had “whiffs of the future in it” in terms of its permissiveness about lifestyle choices. Nicholas Pileggi, a writer and producer, suggested that given her address, Ms. Converse, a loner, would have had no problem hanging out by herself at Chumley’s, a former speakeasy.The upstart book publisher Grove Press was also just down the block, and she was close to The Nut Club at Sheridan Square, where jazz musicians often played, as well as the more respectable Village Vanguard.Grand CentralPhotographs from Ms. Converse’s scrapbook show her first and only appearance on live television: The Morning Show, with Walter Cronkite. There is no recording of the live performance. The Musick Group, Heroic Cities LLCHer first and only television appearance was in 1954, on the “The Morning Show” on CBS (hosted that year by Walter Cronkite), though how Ms. Converse secured the appearance and what she played and talked about may never be known (shows at this time were broadcast live; no archival footage exists). Because the program was staged in a studio above the main concourse at Grand Central and shown live on a big screen in the hall, everyone bustling through the station that morning could have looked up and caught the young musician’s one and only brush with success.Ms. Converse was extremely close to her younger brother, Phil. When he visited her in the city for the first time, Ms. Converse described the reunion in her irregularly kept diary, noting that the two “met like strangers at Grand Central, and fell to reminiscing over oysters.”Hamilton HeightsMs. Converse took a photograph of the street below her W. 138th St. apartment in 1958.The Musick Group, Heroic Cities LLCIn 1955, Ms. Converse took up residence at 605 West 138th Street, in Harlem, a block away from Strivers’ Row. There, she shared a three-bedroom flat with her older brother, Paul, his wife, Hyla, and their infant child, P. Bruce, a situation she called “a cost-saving measure.” The new apartment had an upright piano, which Ms. Converse used to compose an opera (now since lost), a series of settings for poems by writers like Dylan Thomas, E.E. Cummings and Edna St. Vincent Millay, and a song cycle based on the myth of Cassandra who, according to Greek mythology, was given the gift of prophesy and then cursed to be never understood.Circle in the SquareThe 1956 production of “The Iceman Cometh,” which Ms. Converse attended. Sam Falk/The New York TimesAn avid theatergoer, Ms. Converse attended Jose Quintero’s 1956 revival of “The Iceman Cometh,” which made Jason Robards a star and effectively launched the Off-Broadway movement. “Did I mention that I saw an in-the-round production of ‘The Iceman Cometh’ last month?” she wrote to Phil and his wife, Jean, that October. “Some four and a half hours of uncut O’Neill, but only the last 15 minutes found me squirming in my seat.”The Blue AngelAt this erstwhile nightclub on East 55th Street, unique at the time for being desegregated, Ms. Converse met the cabaret singer Annette Warren, who expressed interest in covering Ms. Converse’s songs, and who would make at least two of them, “The Playboy of The Western World” and “The Witch and the Wizard,” staples of her show for decades to come.1960: The Lost Tape; Goodbye, New YorkNational Recording StudiosNational Recording Studios, at 730 Fifth Avenue between West 56th and 57th Streets, had been open for only a year when Ms. Converse showed up in February 1960 to record an album. It was a solo session that, because she did just one or two takes of each tune, only took a few hours. The recording was a rumor until 2014, when Phil Converse unearthed a reel of it in his basement. An adman who was a fan of Ms. Converse’s music had procured the recording session for her for free. That album, the only one she made, remains unreleased.Upper West SideMs. Converse in her apartment on West 88th Street, her last known residence in New York. The Musick Group, Heroic Cities LLCMs. Converse closed the circle of her peripatetic Manhattan existence by moving back to where she’d started: the Upper West Side. This time, she lived in a brownstone on West 88th Street, a half block from Central Park. This was her last known New York address; by 1961, she was gone.Her music, mostly made in isolation or at small gatherings, was nearly lost but for the efforts of her brother Phil, who archived what he could; David Garland, who played her music on WNYC in 2004 and 2009; and Dan Dzula and David Herman, the students who, decades later, introduced her work to a new generation.“The first time I played a Connie Converse song for a friend, she sat silently and cried,” Mr. Dzula said. “From that moment I knew Connie’s magic would reach at least a few more people in a deeply personal and special way.”He added: “Could I have envisioned her blowing up like this when we first put out the record? Absolutely not. But also, yeah, kind of!”Howard Fishman is the author of the new book “To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse.” More

    • 175 Shares159 Views

      in Movies

      Julian Sands, ‘Room With a View’ Actor, Is Missing on Hike in California Mountains

      by

      The search for Mr. Sands, a British actor known for the 1986 film “A Room With a View” and other roles, is an avid trail hiker. His disappearance follows weeks of devastating weather across California.The British actor Julian Sands, known for his role in the critically acclaimed 1986 film “A Room With a View,” among others, is one of two missing hikers the authorities are searching for in the San Gabriel Mountains in Southern California following a period of heavy rain and snow across the area.Mr. Sands, 65, of North Hollywood, was reported missing on Friday after hiking alone on a trail on Mount Baldy, more than 40 miles northeast of Los Angeles, Mara Rodriguez, a spokeswoman for the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, said on Thursday. The trails there are popular but also labeled challenging and strenuous on hiking websites.Search efforts had been affected by “trail conditions and the risk of avalanche,’’ Ms. Rodriguez said.“However, we continue to search by helicopter and drones when weather permits,’’ she added.Elsewhere in the San Gabriel Mountains, the authorities are searching separately for another missing hiker, Robert Gregory, 61, of Hawthorne, Calif. That search is being handled by the Hawthorne Police Department, supported by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office San Dimas station.Mr. Gregory was reported missing on Friday evening by his wife after he had not returned that day in the Crystal Lake area. The police said his vehicle was found Saturday outside a cafe in front of a trail head in the area.Early on Jan. 13, Robert Gregory left his Hawthorne, Calif., residence to go hiking. When Mr. Gregory failed to return home, his wife contacted the police.Hawthorne Police DepartmentLt. Louis Serrano of the San Dimas station said on Thursday that search and rescue teams were on the ground and that aerial patrols were continuing.More on CaliforniaStorms and Flooding: A barrage of powerful storms has surprised people in California with an unrelenting period of extreme weather that has caused extensive damage across the state.New Laws: A new year doesn’t always usher in sweeping change, but in California, at least, it usually means a slate of new laws going into effect.Facebook’s Bridge to Nowhere: The tech giant planned to restore a century-old railroad to help people in the Bay Area to get to work. Then it gave up.Wildfires: California avoided a third year of catastrophic wildfires because of a combination of well-timed precipitation and favorable wind conditions — or “luck,” as experts put it.Representatives for Mr. Sands did not immediately return requests for comment on Thursday.A stream of atmospheric rivers, storms that are narrow in shape and carry a tremendous amount of water, have slammed much of California in recent weeks, causing flooding, power outages and widespread evacuations. At least 19 people have died.On Friday, when Mr. Sands was reported missing, another round of storms was just beginning to sweep across Southern California, lasting through the holiday weekend.By Wednesday, conditions had not improved and the sheriff’s office urged hikers to “think twice and heed warnings,” adding that rescue teams had responded to 14 rescue missions on Mount Baldy and the surrounding area in the last four weeks.The rescue missions were for lost, stranded and injured hikers, two of whom did not survive after falling and injuring themselves, officials said. The recent storms brought snow and ice to the mountain, and conditions were not favorable for hikers, even those with experience, the authorities added.Mr. Sands, a British performer who has appeared in more than 150 films and television shows, including “Arachnophobia,” “Naked Lunch,” “Warlock” and “Ocean’s Thirteen,” is known to enjoy the outdoors. He is best remembered for his starring role at 27 opposite Helena Bonham Carter in “A Room With a View,” the Oscar-nominated Merchant Ivory adaptation of E.M. Forster’s novel, which often makes lists as one of the best British films of all time.In an interview with The Guardian in 2020, Mr. Sands said he was happiest when close to a mountain summit on a cold morning and had aspirations of climbing a remote peak in the Himalayas. He also described a time in the early 1990s when he was caught in a storm above 20,000 feet in the Andes. “We were all in a very bad way,” he said. “Some guys close to us perished; we were lucky.”In another interview that year with Thrive Global, a company started by Arianna Huffington that provides behavior change technology, Mr. Sands said that he had spent time in mountain ranges in North America and Europe.Mr. Sands said that people who don’t climb mountains assume it’s about a “great heroic sprint” to the summit and an ego.“But actually, it’s the reverse,” he said. “It’s about supplication and sacrifice and humility, when you go to these mountains. It’s not so much a celebration of oneself, but the eradication of one’s self consciousness. And so on these walks you lose yourself, you become a vessel of energy in harmony, hopefully with your environment.” More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      Vatican Pledges to Look Into Emanuela Orlandi Disappearance

      by

      Vatican officials said they would reopen a cold case that has gripped Italians, spawned countless theories and been the subject of a Netflix documentary series.ROME — Four decades after the daughter of a Vatican employee vanished from a street in Rome while walking home from a music lesson, a case that has spawned endless theories by a transfixed Italian public is getting a fresh look, a prosecutor said Tuesday.The Vatican’s top prosecutor, Alessandro Diddi, said his office would try to “give answers” to the family of 15-year-old Emanuela Orlandi, who was last seen on June 22, 1983.Although Emanuela’s survivors have pressed the Vatican for years for information, the prosecutor’s sudden decision to look into one of Italy’s most famous cold cases took them by surprise.“You have to explain why the case was reopened now,” a lawyer for the family, Laura Sgro, said Tuesday. “We hope that the prosecutor’s will is effectively real and will come to something soon.”Her last filing on the case, Ms. Sgro noted, was 2019. Then in late 2021, she followed up with a letter written to Pope Francis telling the pontiff that new information had emerged that the family hoped to share with the Vatican.Francis urged her to contact the Vatican prosecutor “in the spirit of full cooperation,” but when she reached out to Mr. Diddi a year ago, she got no response, Ms. Sgro said.Over the decades, the family’s quest to discover what happened to the teenager has taken many tortuous twists. Reports have variously linked her fate to the Sicilian Mafia, Bulgarian agents, a notorious Roman crime gang and the assassination attempt on John Paul II, by way of an American archbishop involved in a major Italian banking scandal.Previous investigations led nowhere. One involved the exhumation of bones from a crypt in a church in Rome, and another a search for evidence in a Vatican cemetery, which the Vatican allowed.A photograph released by Vatican Media showing the opening of the ossuary at the Teutonic Cemetery in the Vatican as part of an inquiry into the case of Emanuela Orlandi in 2019.Vatican Media, via Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesUntil this week, the Vatican has never formally investigated the case itself, saying that the disappearance took place on Italian soil. Mr. Diddi said that after becoming chief Vatican prosecutor three months ago, he began reviewing the requests made to it over the years by the Orlandi family. “We are putting in order all the things that have been presented to us,” he said.Though dozens of books and documentaries have focused on the case in Italy, it received greater exposure after the release on Netflix last October of a four-part series titled “Vatican Girl,” which explores the various theories that have emerged about her disappearance. The series also took the Vatican to task for not carrying out its own investigation and not doing more to help Italian authorities over the decades.“It was the first time the story was told internationally,” said Chiara Messineo, the producer of the series, and it engaged audiences with “the story of a family that lost a daughter and a sister, that is very much also the story of a small pawn caught up” in a global chessboard.Ms. Messineo, speaking from her home in London, said she believed the popularity of the series had increased the pressure on the Vatican “so that they had to do something.”An undated picture of Emanuela Orlandi.via Associated PressMs. Sgro, the lawyer, said a request made by lawmakers last month to establish a parliamentary commission of inquiry into the girl’s disappearance, along with two other cold cases, may have also prompted the Vatican to finally act.“There is evidence that the Vatican knows much more than it has let on,” Senator Carlo Calenda told reporters at a news conference at which the proposal was presented in December.The proposal for a parliamentary commission must be approved by both chambers of Parliament to get off the ground.“We are a great secular nation that treats the Vatican with respect,” Mr. Calenda said, “but certainly cannot consider this case closed in the way it’s been closed.”The Vatican, too, has an interest in solving the mystery of Emanuela’s fate, he said, because the truth “always comes out in the end.” More

    • 63 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Finding Yingying’ Review: Vanishing Point

      by

      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Finding Yingying’ Review: Vanishing PointThis documentary about the search for a missing student in Illinois takes a compassionate approach to grim material.A march to promote the finding of Yingying Zhang.Credit…MTV Documentary FilmsDec. 10, 2020, 12:00 p.m. ETFinding YingyingDirected by Jiayan ‘Jenny’ ShiDocumentaryNot RatedFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.The chilling documentary “Finding Yingying” watches a family grapple with an unfathomable horror: the disappearance and probable death of a loved one who was living far away. Yingying Zhang, a visiting scholar from China at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, went missing in June 2017. What happened with the investigation and in court can be found online, but most of the film deals with the dread-filled uncertainty before those outcomes, and with the continuing search for Zhang’s body.The director, Jiayan “Jenny” Shi, reads Zhang’s diary entries in voice-over and ponders her similarities with the missing woman. Both attended the same university in China, and shortly after arriving in the United States, Shi herself got into a car with a stranger, as Zhang is shown doing in security footage. (Zhang, in one of her most foreboding diary entries, had written of another circumstance in which she was walking in heavy rain and yearned to be inside a passing car.)Cultural expectations become a huge part of the story. Zhang’s family and boyfriend grow frustrated with the justice system in the United States (the pace is slow and there’s no way to make a suspect talk). Shi films Zhang’s family members in China as they consider their lives without her. (“Americans won’t give up on my daughter, right?” her mother asks.) The film captures their ordeal with compassion and a measure of self-reflexivity, which is as much as this unavoidably grim material could ask for.Finding YingyingNot rated. In English and Mandarin, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. Watch through virtual cinemas.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More