“Sorry… Forget this is New York, not Beijing,” laughed Jia Zhang-Ke, a titan of Chinese cinema’s post-1990 “Sixth Generation” of directors, to a packed house inside Alice Tully Hall for the New York Film Festival on Tuesday.

In a Q&A after the U.S. premiere of his latest film, Caught by the Tides, Jia’s English translator could barely keep up as he effusively spoke about the 23-year journey to bring his new project to the big screen. While many in the audience understood the director’s native Mandarin, his translator transcribed as quickly as possible for the English speakers. One thing that needed no translation was Jia’s passion for providing a world view on contemporary China through a cinematic lens.

Caught by the Tides follows Qiaoqiao (played by the director’s real-life wife and muse Zhao Tao), a lovelorn singer who traverses miles across her northern province amidst China’s political and economic changes and the outbreak of COVID-19. A decades-long depression slowly consumes her as she realizes her boyfriend’s search for a better life did not include her. (The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney says of Zhao, “Her face is one of the most transfixingly expressive in modern cinema, and her long collaboration with her husband Jia stands among the screen’s greatest actress-director unions.”) In the end, which is set in the aftermath of the pandemic, Qiaoqiao makes a choice that secures her future.  

For Jia, empowering Qiaoqiao with a strong sense of self after years of living ambiguously was paramount in culling down “mountains of footage” from his two cinematographers, Yu Lik-wai and Eric Gautier, who filmed interchangeably between 2001 and 2023. Caught by the Tides is composed almost entirely of improvisational footage Jia has been shooting across China with his troupe of longtime collaborators over the last two decades.

“Through the back and forth of trying to figure [Qiaoqiao] out, I suddenly realized that this is just a strong female character who doesn’t matter whether or not she has a family or married,” Jia explained through a translator. “This is a character that, at the end, suddenly realized that she will be just fine by herself, be herself, and she will not somehow feel as though that she cannot live without love, without family, without marriage.” And without missing a beat, the director added in perfect English to the audience, without “a man.”

Another cinematic element Jia — who won the Venice Film Festival Golden Lion in 2006 for his film Still Life — ensured was that contemporary China was correctly captured. “When I was looking back on the footage for the last 20-something years, and [I was] also thinking about what will happen to these two characters in 2020, especially at a unique time. Collectively, as a country, people are going through the kind of inclination, the kind of solitude, the kind of loneliness,” he said. “Looking back on the footage, Qiaoqiao [having] gone through hell in the name of love, I thought I needed to do something for the here and now, for the contemporary part, to really dictate what happened to this particular character.”

Jia continued, “After all the traumas and the damage is done to her, I thought about the fact that if I can position her in a supermarket — which is a very public facing space, full of merchandise and very much a space to have the sharp contrast of the loneliness that she’s feeling. [Also I needed to] incorporate this robot friend; it’s very interesting when viewers watch my film during some of the festival screenings, they feel this is a science-fiction film because of the existence of those robots. But without knowing that currently in China, you see robots everywhere. They are omnipresent, and you can see them in hotels, in restaurants, in offices.”

“For me, it’s to really think about, how am I going to, on the one hand, capture the essence of this political character, and then, at the same time, also bring in the contemporary Zeitgeist in China,” he explained. “It’s almost as if I am having one foot in the past and one foot in the future. Through the use of robots, I am using the film to step into the future as the country evolves.”

Before a celebratory post-screening dinner with NYFF guests, journalists and Rolex executives at NYC restaurant Tatiana by Kwame Onwuachi, Jia spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about returning to the festival, which has showcased 10 of his films over the last 24 years. “I’m very happy, very pleased,” and with a laugh, “I like to see her on the bigger cinema.” Whether he was referring to his wife or his project on Alice Tully Hall’s gigantic screen is up for interpretation.

The NYFF event was put on in partnership with Rolex; Jia, alongside fellow star directors Martin Scorsese and James Cameron, is a Rolex Testimonee, as the brand maintains close ties with the world of cinema and has a partnership with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (serving as a sponsor of the Oscars). Jia has also collaborated with young Filipino filmmaker Rafael Manuel as part of the Rolex mentoring program.