Yet on that summer afternoon in 2018, a little more than one year after Zhang's death, any signs of the toll that a long, continuing legal battle had taken on Hou were absent from his face. There was only softness－the kind one exudes reminiscing on what may seem like trifling details of life but that are nevertheless somehow reassuring.

"Occasionally, I would come here to pick up clothes for her," said Hou, pointing to laundry hanging from a clothesline tied between trees.

Listening to this on the other side of a video camera was Shi Jiayan. With a master's degree from the journalism school of Northwestern University, Shi, with her partner Sun Shilin, followed Hou and members of Zhang's family between July 2017 and September 2019, shooting 300 hours of footage that was eventually edited down to 98 minutes in a documentary titled Finding Yingying.

This year Finding Yingying, Shi's debut feature documentary, was awarded the Special Jury Prize for Breakthrough Voice at the renowned South by Southwest (SXSW) Festival, an annual celebration of independent film and music in Austin, Texas, that was forced to cancel all its live events this year by the pandemic.

"To the family, the search hasn't come to an end and probably never will," says Shi, 27, alluding to the fact that Zhang's body, believed to be lying a few meters underground in a private landfill, is unlikely to be recovered.