Interview with Vee Shi / Time and Tide (SFF26)

By Jesse Dixon

Time and Tide Contemporary China is seen through the eyes of a multigenerational family navigating the pressures of familial obligation in this compelling, hybrid docu-drama.

Jesse Dixon: Vee, thank you so much for speaking with me today, and congratulations on your film, Time and Tide. I’m curious, do you remember the first documentary you watched, or otherwise the documentary that first sparked your interest in this form?

Vee Shi: To be honest, I never consider myself as a documentary filmmaker. I actually never intended to make a documentary, it kind of just evolved that way, which we can get into. But if we are talking about a film that really introduced me to the power of documentary, I watched ‘Til Madness Do Us Part, directed by Wang Bing, a documentary that was shot entirely in a psychiatric hospital in China. I had this goal that I would watch a film a day, and I would just pick anything that comes my way, and I didn’t read a synopsis or anything like that so I didn’t even know it was a documentary. And then 2 hours in I was like, wow, this is amazing, but why is it still going? And then I realised it was a 4-hour documentary, and I would never have picked that film if I had known that. But it was such an incredible experience, knowing that those people are real and the story that we’re seeing on screen is real. I thought that was incredibly powerful.

JD: You mentioned that you weren’t originally planning to make a documentary. When you received notice of your father’s stroke, and you were going to go see him in China, was that when you decided to make a film at the same time or had you already thought about shooting a film in China?

VS: I had always wanted to shoot a film in China, it was just a matter of trying to find the right story. Initially, the idea was actually about a son going home to divorce his parents. That was kind of based on my own experience. After my parents retired they weren’t really happy at all, and I just had this idea that maybe they would be better if they were divorced, and find happiness somewhere else. So we had this idea of going to China and shooting something like that, and then I started writing the screenplay. And then my dad had a stroke. And that changed the whole dynamic of the film, because now it’s changed from the idea of personal happiness to having much larger themes about society, responsibilities, aging, and who has to look after your parents.

All four children, all my sisters and I are not at home. I’m in Australia, I’ve got two sisters in London, and another sister who is really far away from my parents, so my mum became the only person who could look after my dad, even though she wanted to leave him before he got sick. That gradually became the theme of the film as I became stuck in this dilemma. I didn’t know what was the right thing to do, we couldn’t just ask my dad to move out after he got sick. So based on that, I wrote a 90-page screenplay, thinking I’ll just get my family to be in the film and we’re gonna shoot this fictional film that’s based on our family story. So that was the inception of Time and Time.

JD: What was your family’s reaction when you asked them to be in the film?

VS: It was so easy, there was no resistance at all. I was really surprised, I was like oh, I’m gonna come home and we’re gonna shoot a film and you guys are gonna be in it. They were like, okay. So, yeah, it was so easy.

JD: Talking about the actual production of the film, when you were thinking about what to shoot, was it more like okay, we’re about to have dinner, I’m gonna put a camera here and record what’s happening, or was there a more concrete plan for the footage you needed?

VS: I think it’s a little bit of both. The original screenplay was based on my family’s life, so the things I wrote are the things that they usually do anyway. I just structured it in a way to tell a story. When we were shooting there were only three of us, myself, my DOP/producer, and also my sound recorder. We actually stayed with my parents in their apartment during filming, and we had cameras going during all waking hours which was really useful. And then, as you said, I had a framework of what the story was going to be about, a checklist of things that I had to shoot in order to make it make sense. At the end of each day, my DOP/producer Nicholson Wren would inject the footage, and then he would lock everything, and then he’d go to sleep, and then I would get up early in the morning and do 3 hours of editing. I edit everything that we’d shot a day before, and as it progresses I’m actually just editing the film, and then we have breakfast and watch/discuss what we have, and from there I’ll plan out if we need another…dinner thing, or if we have to go somewhere, or if we need something with my mom, or my dad. So it was really a process of shooting, editing, revising the script, which we did every day for a month.

JD: You are also in the film as one of the subjects in the documentary. I was really curious about the experience of simultaneously directing the film and starring in it, especially since it’s so personal. Can you share a little bit about that and how you balanced those two roles?

VS: It was really weird. I knew that I had to be in the film to introduce the family but then the more that we started shooting I realised that I had to be a character and also direct them as my character. It worked like this: I know what my family will respond to in certain situations, so I would gently drive the conversation. I would say certain things that I knew would provoke something and then introduce a domino effect. But at the same time, I have to be mindful of where the camera is, and make sure that they’re not blocking the camera. And there are moments where it’s such an emotional scene so I was personally affected by it, but also I’m thinking about how it’s being captured from a filmmaking perspective.

JD: Now that the experience is over, how did you grow as a filmmaker during that time and did it influence the kind of stories that you want to tell in the future?

VS: The biggest thing that I’ve learned from making this film is that it doesn’t matter whether it’s fiction or it’s documentary, it’s always about the emotional truth of the characters. When you’re writing something or you’re showing something on screen the audience has to believe that whatever it is feels true for the character, in order to connect with them. Initially, my script was a grounded family story that also has sci-fi elements, and we shot all those scenes, but it was during the editing process that we realised all those hyper elements kind of take you outside the story. The power of the finished film comes from knowing that this is a real family, a real story. So we took away those sci-fi elements, and then the film got better. In the process of editing, the process of elimination, we took away the sci-fi and the things that were scripted, and we realised that the more artificial scenes that we took away, the better the film became. However, there are remnants of minor fictional elements that were important for the film, so we kept those in. We still have to tell a story and we felt necessary to keep those things in, so there’s a cohesive narrative. That’s why I called it hybrid nonfiction, because it’s not 100% observational.

JD: Your film’s playing at the Sydney Film Festival very shortly, which is so exciting! After that, what are your plans for the future? Are you planning to tour this film around or do you have anything new in the works?

VS: We’ve applied to most of the film festivals in Australia, so, when they do happen, I’ll try my best to attend, because I love watching films with an audience and from different cities and different countries. I think that’s always so nice. I am currently working on my next feature film, which has received development funding from Screen Australia. I love magical realism and also sci-fi, and this new film is fantasy. It’s actually based on a Chinese mythology, and I’m adapting that into, like, a contemporary story set in Australia. I also work full-time as a development executive for a production company in Melbourne called Big and Little Films. So we’ve got a slate of projects that I’m developing and producing, and my new feature film is being produced by Big and Little Films as well.

JD: That sounds fantastic, that’s a really intriguing premise! Vee, thank you so much for chatting with me about Time and Tide, I really appreciate it!

Time and Tide will have its Australian Premiere at the 73rd Sydney Film Festival, with screenings on Thursday 4th June and Saturday 6th June.