New Jia Zhangke Film: 20 Years Of Footage To Capture A Changing China

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Shanxi is known for its notoriously dangerous coal mining industry. Jia focused on the lives of those left behind by China's“economic miracle” and life outside of the metropolis. His use of non-actors, preference for street shooting and slow minimalist style set his work apart from commercial Chinese cinema.

The second film in the trilogy, Platform, includes a mesmerising performance from Zhao Tao, then an unknown actor who has since starred in all of Jia's later films. Zhao and Jia were married in 2012. Zhao is a key artistic collaborator whose portrayal of strong female protagonists is central to all the director's later work.

Cinema and cultural memory

Jia's international breakthrough came with Still Life (2006), shot in the ancient area of Fengjie on the banks of the Yangtze while cities were being demolished and thousands displaced to make way for the Three Gorges Dam .

Working on Still Life confirmed Jia's belief in“cinema's function as memory” – capturing the present before it disappears. Still Life combined Jia's early realist style with a new surreal approach, including a building taking off and a mysterious flying saucer zooming into the distance.

To Jia, this blend of realism and surrealism is essential for portraying China's rapid historical transformation. He says the speed of development in China“has had an unsettling surreal effect.”

To represent this, he has experimented with all the possibilities of cinema blending documentary, fiction, animation, pop music, Chinese opera and digital images to create a stunning body of work.

Caught by the tides of history

Caught by the Tides continues Jia's experimentation with cinema and history in his most ambitious work to date.

Production was influenced by the COVID pandemic, when Jia was unable to start work on a new film. Instead, he began to review footage he and his director of photography Yu Lik-Wai had shot since 2001.

Jia describes the process of reviewing the footage as“like time-travelling” as he returned to the beginning of the 21st century and his youth.

The film is partly composed of a collage of documentary footage which Jia and his collaborators spent over two years editing. We see excitement in the streets when Beijing is announced as the host city of the 2008 Olympic Games, before cutting to a montage of young people dancing in strobe-lit underground nightclubs.

This kaleidoscope of documentary footage is combined with scenes shot during the making of Jia's earlier films. From this combination of archival footage featuring Jia's regular stars Zhao and Li Zubin, a story emerges about China's rapid change.