"But to me, Yingying feels more like a friend than a victim, someone whose struggles, aspirations and self-doubt I share," says Shi, who has lent her own voice to the documentary by reading out excerpts from Zhang's diligently kept diary, words that anchor the movie emotionally and allow it to "forgo the whodunit trope and the lurid violence that characterizes the true crime genre", to quote one critic.

"Life is too short to be ordinary," wrote Zhang in her final diary entry on June 1, eight days before her death.

On June 29, 2017, that sentence was cited by Hou at a concert held in Zhang's name at UIUC, where the 26-year-old had been doing field research on crop photosynthesis.

Describing her venturing-out amidst a downpour during her brief stay at UIUC, another, earlier entry is drenched in loneliness. "My umbrella couldn't keep out the rain and my glasses were covered with raindrops," she wrote. "As cars were passing, I was thinking: it must be very warm inside there..."