Caught by the Tides

A film built from footage shot across twenty years. From 2001 onwards the director kept shooting extra material with a skeleton crew alongside his own productions. This film was assembled from that archive. The narrative divides into three parts. The first is set in Datong, a mining city; there is a young woman named Qiaoqiao and her boyfriend Bin, and then Bin disappears. The second is set in Fengjie during the years the Three Gorges Dam was built; she goes to look for him. The third was shot after the pandemic and is the only new material. The woman at the centre does not speak a word. The whole narrative runs on looks, movement and the sounds around her. The real subject is less a love story than what the country became over twenty years: closed factories, demolished towns, emptied jetties, and in the last part shopping centres staffed by robots. Zhao Tao leads; she has worked with the director for years. Jia Zhangke directed. An original production for anyone who likes Chinese cinema and narratives built out of archive. For a viewer expecting a classical story, the film pushes plot into second place and proceeds largely as a record of time.