In a Q&A after the U.S. premiere of his latest film, Caught by the Tides, Jia Zhang-Ke’s English translator could barely keep up as he 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.

In the end, which is set in the aftermath of the pandemic, Qiaoqiao makes a choice that secures her future.

“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.”

“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.”

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.