Spring Tide

Language：Mandarin with English subtitles

春潮

Synopsis Three generations of women in modern China. Guo, an investigative journalist trying to write under difficult circumstances, still living in her family home. Her daughter, on the cusp of adolescence. And her mother, who makes up for life’s hardship in her autumn years, is always ready to criticise her adult daughter and her life choices.

Director’s Statement I was a documentary filmmaker for more than 20 years, so I have integrated my observations of the Chinese family into Spring Tide. I prefer to distill the universal elements of life into smaller characteristics, so the people in the film can also easily be found in real life. I believe that whenever you open the door of a Chinese family, you will find a similar bond between the mother and the daughter. When I stepped into middle age myself, I realised that I have so many stories of Chinese women to tell. Spring Tide is the second story of my trilogy on women.

Curators’ Notes Family is not always a place of love and warmth; sometimes, it’s the place that hurts the most. Everything goes wrong in this all-female family where Jianbo, a local journalist, lives with her widowed mother and a school-age daughter. Spring Tide is one of the most recent and widely accalimed feminist films in China, and captures all the distaste, emotional blackmail, and shared agony in the mother-daughter relationship that one could imagine. The three generations of women are also well-thought-through representations of people who have lived through different phases of Chinese history. Featuring two of the finest actresses working in Chinese film today (Hao Lei and Elaine Jin), Spring Tide is a sophisticated family melodrama and a tacit critique of the political trauma that continues to haunt 21st century China.

Festivals&Awards

13th First Youth Film Festival 2019 - Audience Award

29th Shanghai Film Critics Awards 2021 Top Ten Films

22th Shanghai International Film Festival 2019 – Best Cinematography