Review of Zhou Hang’s Spring Tiding

Zhou Hang’s directorial debut, Spring Tiding, is a beautiful film in every respect. From the opening shot of Jia’s face to the high angle on an empty swimming pool to hazy scenes in the church, this short is a delight to watch. The acing is top-notch and the story is compelling, and even heart-wrenching. Produced under the aegis of the American Film Institute, Spring Tiding signals loud and clear that Zhou Hang has a promising career ahead of her. This fact is reinforced by the film winning  the Director’s Guild of America’s Best Asian American Student Filmmaker award for 2021.

The film pulls us in right away with a close up on the face of Jia, played very convincingly by Leann Lei. She’s practicing a speech that she plans to give to her daughter. We discover that Jia, whose husband was dismayed that his wife gave birth to a daughter, left the baby girl outside a supermarket, protected only by a red umbrella. A couple of decades, Jia has managed to trace her daughter, Mei, to Los Angeles, where she is at the beginning of the film.

The story, though, is not primarily about Jia, but about her other daughter, Yiru, played by Shavvon Lin. Yiru is clearly not that interested in her mother’s search for her missing sister. We very quickly get the sense that Yiru is treated a bit as an afterthought by her mother. Yiru tries to help her mother with her English pronunciation, but she’d clearly rather be somewhere else. The only thing that Yiru is really interested in doing in Los Angeles is checking out the schools. She knows her parents probably can’t afford it, but she asks anyways. The silence from her mother after Yiru asks this question is a painful moment. When Jia does finally respond, she says that perhaps Mei can help Yiru figure out the school situation once they find her. The message here is clear: Yiru, already at a disadvantage by being a girl, is playing second fiddle in her mother’s eyes to a daughter she doesn’t even know.

One can only imagine the pain a child would feel having to tag along while a parent looks desperately for a lost sibling, all the while paying little to no attention to her. It is in this sense that mother and daughter are together, but alone. They just do not connect. Jia is willing to fly across the ocean to search for a daughter she abandoned and never knew, but can’t be bother to take seriously the questions she’s getting from the daughter she does know, and who came all this way with her and who is helping her with her English and translating everything for her. Jia, I felt, was really trying to assuage her guilt. She wasn’t engaged in this search for the sake of Mei, but for herself alone at the expense of Yiru.

Jia’s search eventually brings her to a church. Here, in a wonderful scene, Air takes communion. Without giving too much away, this scene is a turning point for Yiru, who decides to confront her mother. The denouement, in a striking scene in an empty pool, will stick with audiences for a long time. The symbolism of the empty pool is clear: something is missing in this relationship. We should also mention the use of a red umbrella as a symbol. Jia tells Yiru that her grandmother carried the umbrella until she was 90. Then, when Mei was born, Jia left the umbrella with her. Somehow in the chain of transmission from grandmother to daughter to granddaughter, Yiru missed out and was never afforded the umbrella’s protection the way her sister, mother and grandmother were.

The film, quite deservedly, has won multiple awards already. In addition to the DGA award mentioned above, Spring Tiding has won accolades at the London Independent Film Awards, the Los Angeles Independent Film Awards and the Indie Short Fest, among others.

Zhou Hang is now a Directing Fellow at the American Film Institute, and has also studied film and TV in China and Sweden. At the moment she is developing a feature length project called, The Reunion.