Time and Tide
Filmmaker Vee Shi’s father, a once proud and stubborn patriarch, is in poor health following a stroke. A longtime Australian resident, Vee Shi hasn’t seen his father for several years. In truth, Vee Shi has always been distant from his family. He heads to his remote hometown in Fuqing with the dual purpose of making a fiction film, and to truly understand his parents for the first time. But as he turns his camera on his family, including his unhappily married mother and single-mum sister, reality and fiction start to blur as generational pain and regret are exposed. Vee Shi’s feature-length debut is an extraordinarily raw and intimate vérité-style film, the first ever shot in the Fuqing dialect.
Special Guests
Nicholson Ren is a Malaysian-Australian Producer and Cinematographer based in Melbourne, Australia. He studied accounting and finance at Melbourne University but began his career in the film industry immediately after graduation. In 2023 he produced and lensed the AACTA-nominated short film “JIA” after winning the AACTA Pitch: focus competition with Vee Shi. His most recent short film “BLUE ORCHIDS” was the Wildcard winner finalist at the revived Tropfest 2026 festival. TIME AND TIDE is his first feature film.
Vee Shi grew up in China and is now based in Melbourne. His work has been nominated for the AACTA Awards, won the Screen Producers Australia Awards and the Iris Prize Youth Prize. He is a recipient of both the Australian Directors’ Guild and Australian Writers’ Guild Awards. He was named one of Screen Producers Australia’s Ones to Watch in 2023 and is an alumnus of the MIFF Accelerator Lab.
Tickets
Sydney Film Festival acknowledges Australia’s First Nations People as the Traditional Owners and Custodians of the land, and pay respect to the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, upon whose Country SFF is based.
We honour the storytelling and culture of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities across Australia.
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