Time and Tide: In Conversation with Director Vee Shi and Cinematographer-Producer Nicholson Ren

Filial piety is a key moral virtue in China. This Confucian doctrine urges children to show respect to parents, obey their wishes, and care for them in old age. Compounded by patriarchal ideals, filial piety often clashes with the rise of individualism in contemporary Chinese society, causing conflicts within the home. Drawing on a tender and vulnerable story from his own family, Chinese-Australian director Vee Shi explores these tensions by blending documentary and fiction in his debut feature, Time and Tide (2026).

When Shi’s father suffers a stroke, the family must come together to care for him despite the hardship, much of it caused by his stubbornness and bouts of anger. During Shi’s month-long visit home – his longest in nearly two decades – he observes the emotional and financial strain his mother and sister endure as they shoulder their duty to the family’s patriarch, while his father’s health declines and he struggles to accept no longer being the family’s provider. However, in the midst of these domestic tensions, Shi also finds solace in reconnecting with his loved ones after years apart. Together with Time and Tide‘s producer and director of photography, Nicholson Ren, Shi chronicles vignettes from his rural-town Chinese family and weaves together a heartfelt story whose reality and fiction blur into one another.

Vee Shi is a China-born, Naarm-based writer and director. While studying interior design and production design, Shi dropped out of school to follow the calling of cinema. He made his breakthrough with the 2023 short film Jia, which screened at more than 20 international film festivals and earned him an AACTA nomination.

Nicholson Ren is a Malaysian-Chinese cinematographer based in Naarm. With numerous cinematography credits to his name, Ren also works broadly across many departments in film production. As Shi’s frequent collaborator, Ren was also the cinematographer behind Jia.

Time and Tide is the duo’s debut feature, which premiered at the 2026 Visions du Réel Film Festival and played at the 73rd Sydney Film Festival, where it received the Documentary Australia Award.

Time and Tide

In advance of the film’s Australian premiere, Shi and Ren spoke with Senses of Cinema about Time and Tide.

— T.B.

Time and Tide is such a deeply personal and emotionally heavy film. Did you spend a lot of time reflecting before deciding to make this project?

Vee Shi: Back in 2023, Nicholson and I were attending a film festival for our short film Jia when I had a sudden urge to make a feature right away. Jia was the first short film we did that was funded. It did quite well in the festival circuit and I was not sure if we could maintain that momentum with shorts, so we decided to follow it up with a feature. Additionally, I had already produced eight shorts and directed four of them, so I wanted to try something else for a change. Nicholson and I quickly decided to book flights to my home in Fujian, China and we went there without a completed screenplay.

Nicholson Ren: We were just excited to do something new. We had no pressure for the film to be released anywhere and that mindset allowed us to just go out there and experiment with our crafts. We only had a month with Vee’s family and this short window of time emboldened us to take bigger creative risks. We are very grateful for the challenges because ultimately, they led us to make a film that was completely different from what we would have ever expected.

How do you find the trust to collaborate with each other on such an intimate film?

Nicholson: Vee and I have known each other for eight years. As a director-cinematographer duo, we had made many short films together and built a lot of trust through these previous collaborations. I also worked as a producer on Vee’s films, which strengthened our bond even further. Knowing that connection existed between us, we went into Time and Tide with a lot of confidence even without knowing what the film was going to be like.

Vee: Outside of filmmaking, Nicholson and I are also close friends. We hang out and talk to each other about films a lot and despite not liking all the same films, we are often drawn to the same elements in the films we see. On and off film sets, our creative partnership developed organically.

Nicholson: I found that Jia was when our strength as collaborators came to light. Vee had this process of breaking down the film’s screenplay with me to determine how we can show the story’s subtext visually. Through our discussions, I found that Vee was very receptive to my input and that his vision as a director was not rigid or immutable. Him being accepting and appreciative of my contributions gave me a sense of creative fulfilment as his collaborator.

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Vee: I remember making some bad decisions while making Jia that I ended up regretting. I was able to talk openly to Nicholson about these mistakes and take in his suggestions and I think our ability to communicate with honesty was instrumental to our collaboration. Although Time and Tide was entirely different from Jia, that open communication laid the foundation for the trust between us.

Nicholson: During the making of Time and Tide, we did not have the opportunity to communicate a lot because Vee needed to be in front of the camera with his family. I ended up having to decide when to move the camera and when to cut. It was just what the film called for. I had a lot of faith in my choices being the right ones for Vee’s story.

Vee: I barely gave Nicholson notes. His shots were always exactly what I wanted. It was like Nicholson could read my mind.

The film blends reality with fiction seamlessly. How did you shift between documentary and narrative filmmaking to achieve that effect?

Vee: At first, I wanted to do a narrative feature. The story was always going to be based on my family. After my parents retired and returned to China from Turkey, my mum was not happy. The original idea was for me to try convincing them to divorce and make the film about that. But I had a lot of difficulty following through with that premise because when my dad had a stroke, it did not feel right to push him away from the family. My siblings all lived far away and my mum was the only person who could look after him. My mum’s dilemma of having to choose between her own happiness and her moral duty to care for my dad became the heart of the film. From there, gradually, the film shifted more and more towards documentary.

Nicholson: I remember that after Time and Tide was finished, Vee still wanted to classify the film as fiction even though it told the true story of his family. For me, that shift towards documentary Vee mentioned didn’t actually happen. I felt that the docu-fiction nature of the film was there from the very start. Before we arrived in China, I had already started filming moments with Vee at the Melbourne airport and on the plane. A lot of what I did on the film was capturing the daily lives of Vee’s family. Everything just unfolded naturally, even the scripted scenes felt truthful to me, aside from the sci-fi elements we decided to omit.

Time and Tide was at some point a science-fiction film?

Vee: That’s right. An earlier draft of the script incorporated some grounded sci-fi concepts. We shot some and even included them in the film’s rough cuts. After test screenings, we learned that the sci-fi components undermined the balance of documentary and fiction in the film. In the end, we decided to cut them out completely. But you could still see some sci-fi props tucked away somewhere in the final cut!

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How did you work with the family members, who were both the documentary subjects and the cast of the film?

Nicholson: We tried the techniques we knew from fiction filmmaking like blocking out scenes and setting up marks for where Vee’s parents would walk to. However, Vee’s parents were very awkward walking to their marks. We had a good laugh at the attempts but learnt very quickly that methods we were familiar with were not viable. So, we decided to just let the family moments play out and I would follow along to capture as many of them as I could. Sometimes, we still had to shoot different angles of the same scene for the edit, but as the cinematographer, it always felt like filming a documentary to me.

Vee: I do want to place a slight emphasis on the script, though. It is true that the entire film feels like a documentary, but a large part of that was because of how I wrote the fiction elements. Most of these centred on my parents. I would think very carefully about what my parents usually said and did and wrote the scenes accordingly. I only wrote what I thought could realistically be moments in their lives. These scenes had very specific narrative purposes and even if we could not get my parents to follow exactly what was in the screenplay, I knew that whatever they did naturally would be close enough to my aims.

Nicholson: I understand Vee’s process, but would argue that those moments with Vee’s parents weren’t really fictional. To me, they still leaned towards documentary. What we did was just setting up some scenarios and let things naturally unfold between Vee’s mum and dad. 

In terms of production, there was only me, Vee, and our sound recordist Yilin Xie (Lin) on set. The crew was small enough to not put Vee’s family on edge. We mic’d the family up at the start of each day and just set up the camera as quickly as we could. After some adjusting, the family just went on with their daily lives as if they had forgotten they were being filmed.

Did you encounter any challenges with such a small crew?

Vee: I think having a small crew actually helped us tackle a lot of the production challenges. We were afraid that carrying a lot of equipment from Australia to China would cause issues with the Chinese authorities, especially since I had acquired Australian citizenship, so we only brought with us a camera and some clip-on microphones. I planned the shots based on the videos my mum sent me of the locations and we knew beforehand what we needed. We brought no lights with us, so everything was shot with lighting that was available at the locations. I liked that better anyways, because Nicholson and I had a specific vision for the film that didn’t rely on elaborate lighting. When we were in China, we bought other equipment from Taobao, a popular online shopping site. Additionally, a small crew like ours attracted very little attention when we shot outdoor scenes. People in China have grown more accustomed to seeing filming in public thanks to the popularity of TikTok, so we didn’t cause any disruption.

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For you, Nicholson, were there any concerns or issues with being there with the camera in those private family moments?

Nicholson: As an outsider, I definitely had concerns regarding the family’s privacy but as a filmmaker, it was my job to capture those intimate, and sometimes emotionally intense moments. I kept thinking about what would happen if Vee didn’t have this shot or that shot in the edit, and that made me focus on my role on the film. To maintain the authenticity of Vee’s family, I needed to be invisible. I often left the camera by itself and operated it with a tablet in another room and Lin also recorded the sound from a distance. During intimate moments, I would only be in the same room with Vee’s family when I had to change the camera’s batteries and memory cards. I remember a very funny moment where Lin heard Vee’s dad badmouthing him and Vee told us to quietly open the bedroom door and sneak the camera in to film that. Because I don’t speak the same language as Vee’s family, I had to pay attention to their body language and read the room to make decisions with the camera.

Aside from Vee’s mother’s moral dilemma, I felt that Vee’s sister’s relationship with her father was also an emotional and narrative anchor in the film. Would you like to comment on that?

Vee: I think it’s true that my sister plays a major role in the story of the film. Originally, we didn’t know if she was going to be in it because she wasn’t sure if she could go to our hometown to visit our family. Eventually, she was able to be part of the film. During the shoot, she and my father had this heartbreaking, heated argument that we managed to capture. During editing, I knew that the argument had to be the climax of the film. And to follow a traditional narrative structure, we needed to set my sister up as a character beforehand. So we scheduled time to film more scenes about her.

Nicholson: It was the middle of the shoot and we had to change our schedule for those scenes. I agreed with Vee that the argument was the pivotal moment that needed to have a bit more setup narratively. To me, it was one of those moments where we relied on our fiction-filmmaking background to make the story work better. It was not purely documentary, but I wouldn’t say that it was scripted, either. It was about having a sense of intentionality. The story of Vee’s sister is still truthful, we only rearranged the timeline of events to underline her emotional truth. And for me, it seemed pretty obvious that Vee’s mum didn’t want to leave Vee’s dad. I felt that focusing on that dynamic too much would have stunted the story.

Vee: I think it was good to look at the way familial duty affected different members of my family. It was interesting to observe that concept from different angles.

Time and Tide (behind the scenes), courtesy of Vee Shi and Nicholson Ren

Vee, your film also examines the intersectionality between filial duty and patriarchal violence. It must have been difficult to observe them in your own family. How did you find the strength to do that?

Vee: I cried so many times during the making of the film. Nicholson knows this, too, and I knew he wanted to comfort me but he made the right call to not interfere. It felt like I had to be two different people at once: my parents’ son and the film’s director. During editing, I would focus on the moments that made me cry. I cried constantly watching back the argument between my sister and my dad, so I knew that it was the most important scene in the film. I think that through making this film, I also connected more with my family. My mum told me after we finished the film that she had not known that so much labour went into making a movie and I felt like she got to know about a different side of me and understood me more. I also became more emotionally attuned to aspects of our family relationships that I hadn’t understood before. The making of the film brought us closer.

About the violence, I want the audience to observe it without judgment. I think a lot of films have conditioned people to look for a villain in a story and reduce people to a single character trait. I didn’t want to tell the audience to condemn anyone as a perpetrator or to look for victims. I wanted the film to examine the context in which violence exists. Violence doesn’t appear out of nowhere and it doesn’t just disappear, either. Unlike in films, life is full of contradictions and conflicts are never neatly resolved. Violent behaviours are a product of the times and, in the domestic context, they reverberate through different generations of a family. Time and Tide looks at how my family negotiates with that violence and continues living with it.

Time and Tide (behind the scenes), courtesy of Vee Shi and Nicholson Ren

Time and Tide also alludes to a lot of social issues that might have given rise to the conflicts in your family. Could you talk more about them?

Vee: Subconsciously, I think I knew those social issues had impacted our family but it was never my intention to draw any attention to them in the film. I think that through documenting my family, these social issues just turned up. While I was editing the film, I did notice that it was due to a lot of government policies, visas, and financial needs that my family became segregated. There was the one-child policy that caused one of my sisters to be separated, then the residential registration system that made it difficult for my nephews to go to school close to the family, then the visa issues that prevented my sisters in England from visiting home and my mum from visiting me in Melbourne. Even our family’s move to Turkey was because we needed financial stability. In my parents’ generation, my mum and dad went through the Great Leap Forward, where millions died of starvation, and then the Cultural Revolution. I realised that my parents went through so much for our family’s survival and a lot of what caused my father’s difficulty adjusting to his elderly status was because of this survivalist mentality that had been ingrained in him. It’s strange. Our societies herald family as one of the most important values, yet it was the larger societal structures that pulled my family apart.

In the film, Vee’s dad said that “time and tide wait for no man,” which beautifully captures the inevitability of growing old and losing status. Is this why the film’s title is Time and Tide?

Vee: I think “time and tide wait for no man” is such a poignant remark. It carries that meaning you said of time being an arrow that can never go back into the quiver. At the same time, I think time being compared to a calming natural phenomenon like a tide gives that saying a different meaning. Like a tide, time smoothens things out, washes away the bumps on the shore. I think whatever hardship has knocked you down, whatever loss you have suffered, will fade away in time. Just like with my family, despite all that happened, over time, things have fallen back into place. 

I kept thinking about the book To Live by Yu Hua. The title is so simple but it carries so much gravity. If you’ve read the book, you would understand. In many ways, I want my film to convey that meaning. In spite of everything that occurs within my family in the film, I think ultimately, it’s just a story about people living their lives. I know many families in China have gone through a similar journey. Every family has its challenges and sometimes they just live through them without making changes or amends. I thought about “To Live” being a good title, too, but decided that “Time and Tide” was more fitting.

Time and Tide (behind the scenes), courtesy of Vee Shi and Nicholson Ren

For both of you, what was the editing process like and how did you work with a composer for the music?

Vee: I think the editing was crucial. We finished shooting the film in 2023, and I spent a lot of time putting it together. There were a lot of different rough cuts, one even had me as the protagonist, but it did not feel right. I had some difficulty with the film’s opening because I was very against voiceovers but in the end, I decided to do one since we needed to provide the audience with important context about my family. The film’s ending was Nicholson’s idea. He captured this moment where my dad was sitting and my mum was dancing in the same frame. I thought it sounded cheesy at first but the second I saw the shot, I knew it had to be the ending. 

Nicholson: It was such a great moment! You could see the distance between the two, which encapsulates the relationship we had been documenting the whole time. I saw that instance and I knew I had to shoot it. At the time, I didn’t know if Vee was going to use it. We shot a different ending, as well, but in the end, Vee decided on the shot I liked. The editing also helped with some technical difficulty that arose due to our filmmaking style. We often did long takes that sometimes lasted up to two hours. As a result, for certain scenes, Vee had to cut different parts of the long takes together and connect them using cutaways. Watching the complete film, these scenes felt seamless and I think the cutaways also helped give the story moments of respite.

Vee: As for the music, we did not have a temporary score for the editing. I finished the edit and sent the film to our composer, Luna Pan, who then added music to where she saw fit. I had worked with Luna previously on our short film Jia, and we collaborated again for this film. I was very aware of how filmmakers can be over reliant on music to manipulate emotions and felt that the film needed to work without music first. Luna understood it and what she did with Time and Tide’s music was to elevate the emotions the film was already able to convey. In the end, despite having to change where certain tracks play, I was very happy with the results. I owe so much to my amazing collaborators.

What were your feelings about showing Time and Tide to an audience, considering the personal nature of its subject matter?

Nicholson: We were very happy to have our film play at Visions du Réel. Having our world premiere at a well-known film festival was great, but we were also very grateful for the amazing response we had from the audiences there. I think it speaks to the universality of Vee’s story, despite it being so personal.

Vee: Someone from the audience came up to me crying and said that the film changed the way they saw their family. I was very touched. I look forward to screening Time and Tide for more audiences and hearing what they think.

Have you let your family see the film yet?

Vee: Not yet. I haven’t made up my mind.