Caught by the Tides

ICON GUIDE
OCOpen Caption screening
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35mm
SFSensory Friendly. Details HERE

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Caught by the Tides

Opens May 23

The preeminent dramatist of China’s rapid 21st-century growth and social transformation, Jia Zhangke has taken his boldest approach to narrative yet with his marvelous Caught by the Tides. Assembled from footage shot over a span of 23 years—a beguiling mix of fiction and documentary, featuring a cascade of images taken from previous movies, unused scenes, and newly shot dramatic sequences—Caught by the Tides is a free-flowing work of unspoken longing, carried along more by music than dialogue as it looms around the edges of a poignant love story.

The film mostly adheres to the perspective of Qiaoqiao (Jia’s immortal muse Zhao Tao) as she wanders an increasingly unrecognizable country in search of long-lost lover Bin (Li Zhubin), who left their home city of Datong seeking new financial prospects. The always captivating Zhao carries the film with her delicate expressiveness, while Jia constantly evokes cinema’s ability to capture the passage of time and the persistence of change: of people, landscapes, cities, politics, ideas.

Alongside his latest film Caught in the Tides, the JBFC will present repertory screenings of classic Jia Zhangke films A Touch of Sin and Still Life.

"What Jia has captured here is the aging not of an individual but of a country... But Caught by the Tides cuts deeper still. Through the strange miracle of its existence, it shows us that the art of the motion picture is aging, too."
Justin Chang, The New Yorker
"Jia’s risky experiment is so uncannily successful that it is possible to come away from Tides with the whimsical impression that this was the film he was building toward all this time, as though all those lauded previous movies were simply him amassing the raw material for this one."
Jessica Kiang, Variety


Coming Soon

April

Opens 5/16

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