For some reason this morning I had the sudden though of the Chinese film Ash is Purest White. It came to mind having not seen it in a while and certainly through a craving of more films like that, feeling an itch which cannot be itched as of late. I looked the film up and to much surprise I noticed the director's name. For some reason I assume it was from another director, though I was happy to see I was wrong there as it opened up a door to a bunch of films I hadn't seen before. To add to this, I noticed that the director had also recently released a film back in 2024 called Caught by the Tides. With a great rating of 99% I figured I had to jump into it immediately and see what it had to offer. Desperate to see if this would be the film which fed the craving I have been feeling for so long; one that displays the beauty of life mixed with the melancholy that comes with a setting or the situations a person finds themselves within.
Inspired by the many films from Asia I had seen that had been more considerate of their environments, where the space is heavily important in how they tell their stories, utilising space as a something more than just a setting, but showing how these spaces influence a person's mind and actions. From the era of New Wave Hong Kong cinema and Taiwan's own similar New Wave trend, but the more recent industrial melancholy that came with China's boom and decline as the nation's interests and culture has rapidly changed, leaving many locations stuck in the past and full of decay as the other cities balloon. That mixture of high technology and low living that isn't quite cyberpunk, missing futurism but featuring a stark contrast in living and culture.
Caught by the Tides is a film which really takes that concept and runs it in a unique way. Switching up the concept of a narrative film by utilising elements of non-fiction and fiction together to tell a story. With great curiosity over some of the scenes I was seeing, I looked up an interview with the director to which he stated having spent the early 2000s just running around with an early digital camera and shooting everything. And how that's something that he still does to this day. This had led to him having an insane amount of footage captured and saved throughout the years. Some of it being documentary styled interviews, some just being the camera capturing raw life around the industrial decay of small towns and their culture houses from a more caring era of the Chinese Communist Party. Moments that speak on the importance of maintaining these rundown locations for the elderly, which have nothing to do since retiring. Their decayed culture house remaining a place for entertainment from performances to social games. Some scenes are very direct and just show how the filmmaker once attended parties and just filmed.
Beyond some of the real documentary styled footage are unused takes from the director’s previous films. This giving the film this switching up between eras feeling as the quality switches from a digital camera of the early 2000s to a modern Arri cinema camera. With this the film has a very dreamlike feeling, as it transitions through time and shows how much things have changed. This mixture of old and new. Showing the rapid growth and transition from China's decaying rough industrial hell scape to a modern prosperous economic shift. Though this isn't to say it's glorifying in any capacity. This is by no means a propaganda piece. It's quite the opposite, even. Showing the changing times with quite a bit of nostalgia. Also displaying the fact that economic growth doesn't necessarily make things better for all. Those in their small industrial towns still attend their rundown culture houses, they still chain smoke their boredom away. They still sing and dance to karaoke to pass the time.
Thrown together within the non-fiction and fiction is a story on the passage of time for a woman that finds herself constantly dancing. A companion of hers lost to time as they go in separate directions in life. Only for her to grow in age with a longing of what happened, curious as to where he his and to find him again. I quite liked this simple story within the film, as I mentioned before it handles that transition of time and showing how quickly things change within a space. More so, it holds up to that title quite well: being caught within the tides of time. Where we forget who we are as the years go by, forgetting who and what mattered to us most when we had that youthful excitement and curiosity. Assuming the years would never come and slow us down. It's simple in how it's told, but it's a beautiful story on life itself in that regard. I highly recommend it for anyone that genuinely enjoys the process of filmmaking. Showing how anything can be thrown together to create something, and how us storytellers should be outside as much as possible with our cameras. Recording everything.
