Caught By the Tides

The freewheeling mix of documentary and archival footage, repurposed deleted scenes from previous Jia productions, and new COVID-era drama conveys a sense of time and space/past and present collapsing in a modern China that is still always moving forward, forward, forward.…

Will Sloan

More on this, I hope, to come - since this is already a movie that’s deeply ingrained itself in my thoughts, and one that I already very much adore. A wonderfully creative (and innovative!) abstract masterpiece, though so much of it - primarily it's central conceit - I…

Neil Bahadur

for jia, to age is to become dignified but uncool. strangely apropos that his images actually get less wrinkly as time passes. on a long enough timescale, everything seedy and jagged becomes classy and smooth. zhao tao is one of the most captivating screen presences of all…

esther

a talismanic film found beneath the digital trash-stratum, coordinated somewhere between a chopped & screwed wang bing doc, a late-godard domestic remix, and an arthur lipsett pop music video -- which is to say it's another masterwork from one of cinema's brightest souls,…

comrade_yui

More than just reusing footage that belong to early shoots, this feels like a more ample rethinking of a lot of strands of Jia’s drama and aesthetic strategies as they relate to China as a whole. A fascinating auteurist object, even more so because it does look forward.…

Filipe Furtado

A searching and scattershot portrait of displacement that’s as likely to resonate with Jia Zhang-ke devotees as it is to mystify those who are new to his work, “Caught by the Tides” finds the Chinese auteur returning the most pivotal characters and locations that have…

davidehrlich

The way Jia tracks time via handheld mini DV to robotic security cam footage is truly astonishing. Decades traversed through a digital void where memories are pixelated and fragmented. That transition from the aerial view of the ballroom into the grocery store oranges may…

Brandon Streussnig

The subject position of Communist youth was not gender specific. Clinging to this position, young women like me sensed few gender constraints in our devotion to the revolution. Numerous young female leaders emerged on this island with eight farms. This cohort never believed…

Avalyn Wu

“I was twenty-three years old when I enrolled in the Beijing Film Academy. Most of my classmates were teenagers who had just graduated from high school, and I was five years older. Unlike them, I had no time to lose. For me, it was the end of being carefree. For them, life…

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