Critics Campus 2026 participant Wen-Juenn Lee speaks to Vee Shi about family, the blurring of character and candour, and the curious ways that fiction can coax out emotional truths, as seen in his poignant hybrid documentary.

The family unit is a mini political state. It is as much a source of pain as it is a source of belonging; its members might leave it, but they are always bound to it in some way. Time and Tide follows Melbourne-based filmmaker Vee Shi, who returns to his hometown, Longtian, in south-eastern China after his father suffers a stroke. It is the first time Vee – visiting with collaborator and cinematographer Nicholson Ren – has returned in four years. Initially conceived as a work of science fiction, the resulting film captures the family’s everyday life, in which love and duty, the mundane and the lyrical, sit side by side.

I caught Time and Tide a week before I was to see my parents again. It was almost unbearable to watch for its truth – for its comedy and tragedy alike.

In an interview with Senses of Cinema, you highlight a really interesting point of difference between you and Nicholson Ren regarding which parts of Time and Tide are documentary and which are fiction. What role does fiction play in the film?

After we did a lot of interviews about the film together, Nicholson and I realised that we had very different experiences. I had this story in my head that I wanted to tell, and Nicholson was basically trying to capture what was there. During filming, we never considered that we were filming a documentary. The whole idea was that we just wanted to capture moments that felt real. I was hoping that I could use those moments to weave them into the sci-fi elements of a narrative film.

At what point did you realise you weren’t going in the direction of sci-fi?

Maybe there were two directions that changed. The first was how we approached filming. Initially, I had a screenplay. I had scenes where my mum would have to walk from A to B, to say and do certain things. But then I quickly realised that she just couldn’t do that. She was so different in front of the camera! The second we’d give her directions – like, “That’s your mark, you have to walk there” – she’d become so self-conscious.

After a few days, I realised: This is definitely not working. I can’t tell my parents what to do or what to say, so they just need to do whatever they have to do, and I need to film moments that give a sense of emotional truth.

Because I couldn’t film scene by scene with my script, I had to edit every day. I spent three hours editing whatever scene we shot the day before, and I started cutting what we were filming. So we would do edits, then I would sit down with Nicholson and explain what was being said and what we needed to capture for the next day or two. I would talk to my parents about what they would be doing. And I would work out: Is that scene going to work for the story? If it’s going to work, then we’ll film it.

Time and Tide

Could you tell us how translation functions in Time and Tide, from Nicholson not understanding Mandarin but being able to capture the emotional frame of the film, to you acting as the family mediator?

First, I want to go back to your question about fiction. In editing, I still forced the film to be a fiction. But the story just didn’t work for me, and I didn’t know why. We did an audience testing and, from the conversations we had, what people resonated with was the fact they thought it was a documentary. That was the point I realised the tension was between my intention and what the story wanted to be. My intention was wanting Time and Tide to be fiction, but the story itself wanted to be nonfiction. So I did another edit and I took away all the things that were staged.

You could also say that [the way] to get the most authentic performances out of my parents was by not interfering too much. But I was actually surprised by how much I knew my family. I could say or do certain things, and they would react in the way I wanted them to. In hindsight, I realised I was basically directing them by understanding who they are.

I got a real sense of loneliness from your father. Could you speak more about that?

Before filming, I didn’t really know how lonely [my dad] felt. It was only by spending time with him that I saw how much resentment my mum had for him – that I realised he wanted to be loved. That position of being so lonely in the family, but also what he did to cause that, is such an interesting thing to explore in a film. We can both understand why it happened and feel for him as well.

There’s a scene where my dad is badmouthing me. I was in a different room, and Nicholson came to me saying, “Your dad is on the phone saying something.” Because his mic was still on, I listened to what he was saying and realised. Someone else pointed out [that] my dad was almost performing for me. He always wanted to get our attention – to say certain things to see what I would think. In a roundabout way, he was telling me that I didn’t care about him without saying it to my face. He knew someone was recording. He was saying it for me to hear. It was so true to his character that he would do something like that. He wasn’t performing for the camera; he was performing for me.

I went back through my notes with Nicholson on what we wanted to capture, and one of the notes was: We want the audience to feel like they get to know the family by the end of the film. If we do that, then that will be enough.

Time and Tide screens on Saturday 8 and Wednesday 19 August as part of the MIFF 2026 program.

The above has been written as part of MIFF’s Critics Campus program. The opinion expressed is the author’s and does not necessarily reflect that of the festival.