Caught by the Tides

Throughout his career, Jia Zhangke has depicted and probed into China’s rapid transformation. For his tenth dramatic feature film, Jia literally weaves the past and the present, integrating footage captured from the past two decades into his evocative and poetic tapestry of memories. Jia’s longtime muse and wife Zhao Tao once again takes the spotlight, playing a working- class woman on a cross-country journey in search of an absent lover, who left her while looking for economic opportunities. Through her eyes, we see China’s social changes over the years, from the building of the Three Gorges Dam to the onset of the global pandemic.