Caught in the tides with Jia Zhangke, China's most important filmmaker of the century

Globe and Mail

08-05-2025

Jia Zhangke has earned his reputation as the most important Chinese filmmaker of this century by unblinkingly chronicling the sweeping changes in his country's society. He's depicted its economic upheavals, rapid urbanization and increased globalization – always through the bumpy psychological journeys of characters played by his muse (and wife), Zhao Tao.
In Caught by the Tides, which opens in select Canadian cinemas on May 9, Jia continues this exploration in a fascinating fashion: presenting edited footage he shot over the previous 20 years to create a three-party film about displaced lovers. As it leaps from 2001 to 2008 to 2023, the film allows us to witness not only the country, but Zhao herself, mature onscreen.
But unlike Richard Linklater's Boyhood, which similarly progresses through time but is otherwise relatively conventional, Jia has made a complex concoction that engages with the possibilities offered by digital cinema, blending documentary footage and outtakes from his previous features (mainly Unknown Pleasures, Still Life and Ash is Purest White). The film concludes with scenes shot during the COVID pandemic, complete with up-to-date smartphones, an elderly TikTok influencer and a scene-stealing robot. Whereas before Jia was capturing history, one could say with Caught by the Tides, he is writing it.
Speaking at last year's Cannes, he modestly disavowed any role other than filmmaker. 'I cannot really say that I'm a historian myself. I'm merely a director. But there are many ways to record and to capture, to retain histories; I'm using film as a medium to play my role in doing this.'
He said that using two decades of material allowed him to reflect on the political, economic and technological transformations over that period. 'Society is going through an information overload. How can you understand what's going on now without having a long span of time, using an historical perspective to examine where we were and where we are now? Without that, we won't be able to see very clearly the challenges we are dealing with currently.'
Jia also described the organic way that the film took shape. 'Starting in 2001 at the infant stage of DV [digital video] filmmaking, while I was shooting, I spontaneously used my camera to capture the spaces that I found very attractive, almost like documentary footage. At the time in China, it was a new era, a new millennium, and we were very excited for what's to come.'
But while shooting this documentary footage, he would sometimes include the actors he was working with on a feature film at the time. 'I shot them wandering around or interacting in the cities that I was shooting at the time. And I had a working title: A Man with a Digital Camera. It's paying homage to Dziga Vertov, A Man with a Camera, but I didn't really have a plan.'
Not only does COVID appear in the film, it was the impetus for the project itself. Jia's productions were all on pause so he began looking at his old footage. 'I realized that the camera captured things we thought we'd forgotten, but they're the things which made us what we are today.'
And then he began to wonder if it could be turned into a film. The result is a sweeping work with more music than dialogue, and a marvel of editing that leans heavily toward abstraction. 'There's so much already embedded in the sounds and images that I thought it would become a distraction to create dialogue in a way that would make something too figurative, too concrete, too simple. It was very intentional to keep it more abstract and lead the audience to observe and somehow interpret the details however they want to.'
On the macro level, Jia's new film again revisits familiar political milestones – China's WTO entry, the Beijing Olympics bid, the Three Gorges Dam project – but, as always, looks at these moments through the lives of individuals swept up in the tides of history: Qiaoqiao (Zhao Tao) and Bin (Li Zhubin), who flit about on the margins of the northern coal mining city of Datong, in Jia's own Shanxi province, until Bin decides to try his luck elsewhere.
'Since this film has transformed itself from A Man with a Digital Camera to Caught by the Tides, I really wanted to start with something more macro,' he explains. 'The tides that I'm trying to portray are firstly the stories of the generations born in the late seventies or early eighties, who experienced this idea of reforming people's desire for freedom, and having a better life going forward. I wanted to start with this collective portrait of a country and then go to the microlevel of how these two characters experience their journeys emotionally, romantically, against the backdrops of societal transformation.'
Zhao's astonishing performance ties the film together – often without any spoken lines. In the 2023 section, face obscured by an N95 mask, her eyes do all the talking.
And for all the negative impacts of rapid social change – such as the displacement of a million people for the Three Gorges Dam project – Jia locates the positive in Qiaoqiao's personal development. 'Besides her physical transformation, you also see her character's awakening of her female consciousness. In the beginning, she is young, naive, really thinking that her definition of personhood has to rely on her romantic relationship, so much so that she leaves Datong to look for Bin.'
Eventually, though, Jia says she learns to rely on herself. 'By the end you see her as an independent, strong female trying to live her own truth, and that is the part of the new 'Western' concept being introduced to China. That's the kind of growth I want to showcase and feature.'
Ultimately though, befitting a film that remixes his oeuvre, Caught by the Tides is as much about the man behind the digital camera. Jia sees that, too.
'The footage also captures the emotions that I had throughout these different years of making and capturing these different images and materials. It really documents my own perspective, my own subjectivity.'
Special to The Globe and Mail