Things change and things stay the same in Caught by the Tides, Jia Zhang-ke’s experimental movie inspired by the Covid pandemic. Locked down at home with nothing to do, Jia wondered if he could put something together using unused footage shot over the years – rehearsals for movies, location scouting, technical try-outs to see how equipment worked and so on. Also in there are excerpts from three of the nine films Jia has made with his wife, and star, Zhao Tao, over the years. Unknown Pleasures (2002), Still Life (2006) and Ash Is Purest White (2018). So what we’re seeing here is a montage of stuff that was never really intended to go together, shot over 22 years, on a wide variety of equipment, “starring” people who often didn’t even know they were being filmed.
As a throughline of sorts, a love/chase story down the decades, about pretty young “arrogant” Qiaoqiao (Zhao) and her relationship with Li Zhubin’s Guao Bin. At first she is a model and singer at a club he manages, but over time things switch about. Her hairstyle goes from sexy and modern geometric to middle-aged and practical pony tail, but she’s always on the hunt for the disappeared Bin, with whom there is clearly unfinished business. And then, one day, she runs into him.
As said, it’s a throughline, a fig leaf if you like, because what Jia is really up to is compiling a coffee-table portrait of China as it changes, with much of the focus on the Three Gorges hydroelectric dam and the communities its construction displaced. Over those 22 years China has changed on a vast scale, and has gone from being a largely rural country earning export dollars by manufacturing cheap tat to a largely urban country leading the world in so many branches of tech.
Qiaoqiao is an elemental figure, the eternally wandering Chinese, looking on dispassionately as things change. She starts off as a symbol of a bright new future, the pretty slip of a girl modelling clothes outdoors to crowds of people who probably can’t afford them. And ends working on a till in a supermarket, one of the left behind in a world she is now largely unsuited to. Over those decades the Mao portraits have been taken down. Cinemas have emptied. Polite afternoon dances have been replaced by raves and gay clubs. Bicycles have become robots.
The tone is superficially upbeat but elegiac down below. So many sad songs are sung in so many badly lit rooms. So much grey concrete is poured.
It doesn’t really cohere because maybe it never could, but Jia gives it the good old college try. There are wild changes in “performing” style, from the obviously acted sequences lifted from the films to the more informal, totally loose performances by (often) the same people just rehearsing, the no-stakes atmosphere working its own magic. And changes in film quality too, from footage that’s obviously been carefully lit and photographed to stuff captured on a handycam swinging about seemingly aimlessly.
It is full of arresting images, like the man lifting up water-filled buckets on chains suspended from his eyelids, early on, a holdover from an era when street performers could make a living doing this sort of thing. Much later, on brightly lit modern streets towards the end of the film, we see young people meeting and laughing, buying skewers of barbecued meat from food stalls and falling in love.
Things change and things stay the same, with Jia mounting an unvoiced argument that is mournful on a personal level – does Quioqiao get her man? – but technologically optimistic. It’s ingenious, and genius at times, almost impossible to categorise – drama? documentary? – its own thing entirely.
Caught by the Tides – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
