In ‘Caught by the Tides,’ Jia Zhang-ke Looks Back to Look Forward

The Chinese auteur Jia Zhang-ke has had 10 films play in the main slate at the New York Film Festival over the years, but hasn’t actually attended the fest since 2018, when his drama Ash Is the Purest White was screened there. This year, Jia finally returned with his latest, Caught by the Tides—and opened his speech at the festival’s prestigious Amos Vogel Lecture with something of a joke.

“Friends actually asked me, ‘What happened in the past six years? What’s the biggest change since the last time you were here in New York?’” Jia said at the event Tuesday night, speaking via a translator. “So I will reply and joke about the fact that I started to wear sunglasses wherever I go.”

The audience laughed at his remark—but while the shades look cool, they aren’t just ornamental. Jia damaged one of his eyes during the arduous process of editing Caught by the Tides, which had its New York premiere in Alice Tully Hall just about an hour after the lecture. (Later, he told Vanity Fair that the eye is fine “vision-wise,” but is very sensitive to light.)

Tuesday was a celebration of Jia at the festival’s home base of Lincoln Center. Both the talk and the premiere were presented in partnership with Rolex, the brand for which Jia is a “testimonee.” Jia’s lecture was also followed by a discussion with the Brazilian director Walter Salles, who called it the “most extraordinary masterclass that I’ve ever heard.” Salles is at this year’s NYFF with his Venice hit I’m Still Here, but is also a Jia superfan who made the documentary Jia Zhangke, a Guy From Fenyang, released in the US in 2016.

At the lecture, Jia gave a primer on the unconventional way he made Caught by the Tides—which stars his wife and longtime muse Zhao Tao as a woman who pursues a relationship with an unreliable man (Li Zhubin) over decades. The film is assembled from footage Jia has been capturing since 2001, some of it documentary in nature, and some of it outtakes from his previous films. The narrative ends in 2022 when COVID restrictions are the norm and Zhao’s character is working in a supermarket.

In the lecture, Jia explained that the project began in one sense during the early days of the new millennium, when digital video technology was new. Along with Zhao and a small crew, he would take a DV camera to different cities in his home province of Shanxi. “What we did is just endlessly trying to capture anything that would touch me,” he said.

Transforming this material into Caught by the Tides began in earnest during lockdown in 2020 when the director realized he could no longer go out and shoot. At the Q&A following the premiere, Jia described the laborious process of digitizing the footage, which he captured with multiple types of cameras. At the lecture, Jia talked more broadly about what the film represents.

“Looking back, I think that it not only captures my life in the past 20-something years as a filmmaker with the images that I have captured. I’m also looking back on society and how we have evolved and changed in the past decades as well,” he said. When the film begins the internet is still relatively new. By the end, Zhao is interacting with a robot, the kind that is popular around China these days.

As for the film’s unusual narrative structure, Jia said he took his cues from quantum physics, looking for subtle or hidden connections of seemingly unrelated elements.

At a brief reception following the screening, Jia told Vanity Fair that while Caught by the Tides is indeed the culmination of decades of work, there is no finality to it.

“This hopefully will be a beginning of many films,” he said. “This film will be straddling between one foot in the past and one foot in the future, and I am ready and I have a plan to move forward further into the future.”

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