In many instances, the burden of care for an ageing and infirm parent falls upon the women within the family. In the case of Chinese Yanjin, the stubborn father of Time and Tide director Vee Shi, this responsibility was passed to Jianming, his long-suffering wife, and his daughter Liyun, a single mother eking out a living in faraway Guangzhou.
A particular irony is that daughter Liyun was passed up for adoption by Jianming and Yanjin during China’s one-child policy in order that they could eventually have a boy in the family. That boy was Vee Shi whose film, selected for Visions du Réel International Competition, chronicles the lives of his family, warts and all.
The filmmaker experienced discord even as a small boy. When he was three his father moved to Turkey to work. The family joined him, but thereafter Vee Shi led a peripatetic existence, returning to China before eventually settling in Australia. As he states in the film, he barely saw his parents between the ages of 13 and 34. Yet all the time, he retained a strong affection for his mother, but little more than a sense of filial duty towards his father. His parents knew little about his later life, not even that he had become engaged to a man in Melbourne.
After his father suffered a stroke, Vee Shi decided to return to Longtian, initially to make a fictional story about his parents. “But as my family grew accustomed to the camera, I found myself capturing raw and intimate moments that could only exist within the private walls of a family,” he says, at which point the balance of the film shifted towards highly revelatory non-fiction. “Making Time and Tide marked the longest, most intimate, and most confronting time I’ve spent with my parents,” Vee Shi adds.
The film contains a number of extended, emotionally-charged scenes in which we see what the women of the family have had to deal with over the years. Wife Jianming feels no compunction about continually berating her disabled husband, as for many years she has had to put up with physical beatings from him. Likewise, daughter Liyun is forced to remind her father tearfully of the enormous financial sacrifices she has had to make in order to clear his many debts, some of them through gambling.
By way of counterpoint, as if to show how family bonds can be reforged across generations, a later scene shows Yanjin physically guided by his grandson Songze as they play a shoot ‘em up game in a video arcade.
And of course, when death comes, it is tragic and immensely sad, shown in monochrome with a sense both of majesty and tasteful detachment.
“We never intended it to be a non-fiction at all, even though it was based on true stories,” Vee Shi recalls to BDE his initial motivations for the project. “I actually wrote a 90-page script and we went to China and we wanted to film that. Then we very quickly realised, because my parents aren’t actors they weren’t comfortable performing the scripted scenes. So we had to pivot.”
“We were just trying to work out, okay, we’re here now and we have to make this film. How do we move forwards knowing what they could do and what they couldn’t do? And then we realised what they could do was really to just be themselves,” the director continues. “The guiding principle is still the same. The narrative drive is still the same, but we just kind of had to take away all the things that were scripted to start with. But because we still needed to have this narrative coherence to access the emotional truth, so some of the elements [remained] scripted in a way that’s not far away from the truth.”
“It’s not 100% factual information, but it’s an accurate representation of the emotional truth,” Vee Shi further clarifies.
Despite uncovering some uncomfortable details about his father’s previous behaviour, Vee Shi retains a strong affection for his dad. “During editing and then looking at the film, I had to do my own homework to work out, when my parents were born, what was happening during China at that time, and what could have happened that shaped who they are,” he says. “Both of them went through the Cultural Revolution and before that, there was the Great Leap Forward. Forty million people died in China and I feel like they carried that with them throughout their life… Economic survival is their way to kind of deal with a lot of things.”
“That’s all the stuff that I never got to talk to my dad [about],” the director adds. “But then the film allows me to access that part of his history that I didn’t know about. And I do feel great sympathy and empathy for him.”
Unsurprisingly, making Time and Tide proved to be an emotional roller-coaster for Vee Shi, both during the relatively short period of shooting (three weeks in Longtian and one week in Guangzhou) and during the edit. “When I was first editing the film, I just couldn’t stop crying,” he tells BDE. “Then after a few months, once I watched all the materials…I was able to detach myself from them to see them as characters.”
“But then after my dad passed away, it brought up a lot of different feelings. If I was watching him maybe for five minutes, I’d forget that he actually passed away. And then when I realised that he was actually gone, I realised that my dad’s passing was the first death I’ve really experienced, and I didn’t realise the permanence of death until that [moment].”
Vee Shi is delighted by the film’s selection for Visions du Réel and its world-premiere before a Swiss audience, but feels much trepidation about showing it in Melbourne and in China.
“It’s actually a lot easier in Switzerland because nobody knows me here,” he says. “In Melbourne I’m slightly more comfortable – but I’m actually still really uncomfortable. You know when you show your film to people who know you and then they have to say nice things about you and the film, and so I’m kind of worried about that…,” his voice trails off.
“[In China] they know that the film is being screened here in Switzerland, but I don’t know I’d be comfortable screening it there. I’d be really worried about what they feel, especially my sister, because she felt like she could have done better in terms of the relationship with my dad, and that she didn’t get the chance to amend the relationship before he passed away. So I’m just so worried about bringing up that experience for her as well. It took her a long time to get over the death of my dad.”
All of which underlines the loving, at other times fractious, foundations upon which family structures can be built, and the powerful emotions that can also put them under much strain. For Vee Shi, this was something he felt both the need and to record in his own, very personal, fashion.
“It dawned on me that once they’re gone, all I’ll have left of them are the fading memories of childhood,” he says, adding of his resulting film, “I believe Time and Tide will resonate with audiences seeking authentic, culturally specific family stories that transcend borders.”
