Caught By The Tides - English subtitled
Collage-like film by Jia Zhang-ke (Still Life) in which the Chinese grand master strings together scenes from his oeuvre and new film material to tell a story about separated lovers and the profound transformation of China.
A mesmerizing work that spans twenty years yet challenges the idea of time, Jia Zhang-Ke’s latest masterpiece is a reimagining of his cinema, and a lucid portrait of China’s recent history. Caught By The Tides is also a love letter to actress Zhao Tao, the very embodiment of Jia’s cinema.
In the first part of Caught By The Tides, Jia revisits footage filmed from the century’s start to today. He then unravels the thread of the relationship between Bin (Zhubin Li) and Qiaoqiao (Tao Zhao), and follows the woman’s journey in search of her lost love, from Datong to the banks of the Yangtze River, where millions face relocation and where the Three Gorges Dam is about to submerge cities, memories, and histories. Here, Jia retraces the leitmotifs of his cinema, from social changes and modernization, to memory and nostalgia, in a captivating cinematic experiment that recontextualizes familiar scenes and outtakes from his previous films.
Capturing the emotional and historical trajectories of his characters, the film leads us, in the second part, into the recent pandemic era, where societal fractures could be seen most vividly. As Jia interrogates the power of images and their capacity to shape truth, Caught By The Tides emerges as both a meditation on moviemaking history and a testament to the enduring relevance of storytelling. (source: www.tiff.net, adapted)