An enduring but fragile love story between Qiaoqiao and Bin, set in China from the early 2000s to the present day. In love with each other, Qiaoqiao and Bin enjoy everything the city has to offer, singing and dancing. Until the day Bin decided to try his luck in a bigger place than Datong and left without a word. Some time later, Qiaoqiao decides to go looking for him. In the end, they meet again in Datong, twenty-one years later. The director began filming in Datong in 2001. The city was known as a coal-mining town, but by the time Jia began to spend time there, the mines were being depleted, but China’s economy was rapidly opening up. Time passed, and Jia continued to film the city with whatever camera he was using at the time, from DV to Alexa. Tide is in fact a double portrait, that of Qiaoqiao, a strong, resilient woman, and, in transparency, that of China in the throes of realising its own idea of capitalism. In a way, Caught by the Tides could be seen as Jia’s 8 ½, a moment of reflection on his artistic choices, on what his cinema has been, and perhaps a stepping stone between the paths he has taken and the one he will take. As Jessica Kiang acutely observes, “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. Because the form of ‘Tides’ which is indivisible from its themes and from the lingering effect of its gorgeously looping internal structure, is impossible to ignore but also less than crucial to understand in minute detail. The Jia devotee may wish to parse each scene for its provenance, […] but ‘Tides’ exerts its own inexorable pull.”Teresa Cavina