China's avant-garde director Jia Zhangke took on the current Chinese filmmaking scene in a suicidal way. His award-winning film Still Life premiered on the same day as the global debut of Curse of the Golden Flower, the new blockbuster from the country's leading director, Zhang Yimou.

It was no contest as Curse, with a big budget of 360 million yuan, won the battle from the start in terms of box office performance. The star-studded Curse racked up nearly 100 million yuan at the box office within the first week after its debut, while the take for the low-budget Still Life was only in the tens of thousands of yuan.

Jia joked that the direct crossfire of the two films could be seen as "performing art," saying that it demonstrates the widening gap between the rich and poor of China's film industry in terms of resource distribution, and presents a dilemma between box office popularity and quality.

With their recent box office successes, Chinese filmmakers are challenging the domination of Western blockbusters. More noticeably, these films, with investments in the hundreds of millions of yuan, are aimed at the international market, not just conquering the domestic box office. This is being viewed as a renaissance for Chinese films by promoting them in an internationalized and commercialized way.

The Chinese films that have attained box office success in recent years all have had big budgets and productions, as well as new marketing techniques. In 2006 alone, more than eight domestic films with an investment of over 100 million yuan were produced. They have, in a certain sense, pulled the Chinese film industry out of a box office recession.

Zhang once said that in order for a big-budget Chinese film to recoup its investment, its global box office receipts must be three times its cost. That means Curse needs to take in over 1 billion yuan from the box office, which is almost impossible if it were to rely solely on the domestic market. So such films must appeal to the overseas market as well.

However, this type of filmmaking, featuring large budgets and heavy commercial promotion, is drawing more and more criticism for its single-minded pursuit of profits.

These films are making China's movies lose the ability to provoke thought, Jia said. "I hope the audience can watch some films that reflect real life, rather than flying persons in gold or silver," he said.

The widely acclaimed Still Life, which follows two characters searching for their long-lost spouses in the Three Gorges area and has been praised as warm and moving, won the Golden Lion award for best movie at the 63rd Venice Film Festival in September. But Jia was very clear that his film might do poorly at the box office. His pessimistic forecast was soon proved correct. Still Life lags far behind Curse in box office receipts in Beijing, and in some small cities people cannot see Still Life at all.

To Jia, a big flaw in China's big-budget films is the hegemonic way of production. "Those films have considerable investment, superstars, the cooperation of various resources, grand media promotion, and in one sentence, they have power," he said.

Industry insiders maintain that low-budget films are caught in a vicious circle: the financial issue leads to less attention from the market, and the lack of attention leads to lukewarm treatment by theaters. Even if the films make themselves into the theaters their market performance is not good, further causing theaters to give a cold shoulder to such projects.

Barren visual feasts produce a bonanza at the box office, while warm and moving stories meet with indifference, these people say. This is the ironic reality of the film industry in China today.

Meanwhile, the overseas market favors only a couple of formats-historical costume dramas or kungfu. This presents a difficult choice for Chinese filmmakers-how to balance commercial success with the true nature of filmmaking. n