Since the early 1990s, villagers from Jingcheng in east China's Jiangxi Province, led by Zhou Yuanqiang, creative director of the local cultural center, have learned all the techniques of film production: script writing, casting, shooting, montage and even special effects.

With great enthusiasm, they have already produced 18 serials, although they lack equipment and operate on a meager budget.

Despite these drawbacks, the energetic director Zhou and his troupe of amateur actors have their own long-running kung fu serial.

This is an outstanding feat which raises many questions that beg for answers.

How did these villagers, who have never received any professional training, manage to make their own movies? What was the motivation that made them continue the practice, for almost nothing, for more than a dozen years?

In 2001, when young director Zheng Dasheng read Zhou's story in a newspaper, he was intrigued.

Although they are both engaged in the same career, the two have completely different backgrounds.

Zhou grew up in a countryside orphanage and had never lived in the city.

Zheng was born into a family of film-making in Shanghai, a sprawling metropolis populated by millions.

His mother, Huang Shuqin, was one of the most renowned female directors in China.

Zheng started his own promising directing career a few years ago, devoting most of his time to shooting "made-for-TV movies."

Among his work is The Death of Wang Bo (Wang Bo Zhi Si), which tells about the story of a Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907) poet, and which won China's top award for the genre two years ago.

But the rising young director with rosy career prospect decided that there is a thin thread linking him and the farmers at the small town of Jingcheng.

That thread, he says, is the secret behind successful movies.

"I became excited immediately when I read about Zhou," Zheng said. "I had been considering making a documentary but did not have an appropriate story. When I read about him I knew that was the story I had been waiting for.

"More importantly, back in those days I was thinking very hard about the essence of a good movie," he added.

Why do people need images? What lies beneath the interaction between people and images? These were just some of the burning queries rumbling around his mind.

He had been looking for answers to these questions, Zheng said, and Zhou seemed to be a mirror image of himself.

He was determined to make a documentary about Zhou.

Cash backers

Funding for the project was the most difficult element. Few people and companies were willing to invest in such a documentary. But Zheng was lucky enough that the Movie Channel of China Central Television finally agreed to foot the bill.

On January 1, 2002, Zheng and his crew arrived at the small town of Jingcheng and began shooting.

He did not write any scripts. Instead, he wrote three pages of questions, to which he hoped he could find answers.

Zhou and his followers were making a new kung fu serial. They were very co-operative when Zheng told them he was to follow how they made the program -- and was only too pleased to co-operate so as to meet Zheng's expectations.

"They had already been interviewed by many local and national media. They knew how to deal with intruders like me, but that was not what I needed," Zheng recalled.

The problems he met were quite different from other documentary directors.

The coexistence of the subjects and the camera was problem that needed to be solved. The subjects of documentaries can act tense up in front of camera.

For Zheng, however, the opposite happened. The amateur farmer actors were already too familiar with the camera.

In front of Zheng's camera, instinctively they would act. Instead of being themselves, they acted themselves.

"When I was shooting them, instead of speaking in the local dialect, as they did at usual times, they used Mandarin! That was so unnatural," explained Zheng.

This continued for three months and Zheng found what he had shot was almost completely useless.

A month later Zheng and his crew returned to Jingcheng. This time he was determined to establish mutual trust with local villagers.

"At first we did not shoot anything. We were just chatting with them like usual friends. Gradually, they began speaking the local dialects, which indicated they relaxed."

Sometimes roles were switched. Zhou and his fellow villagers also filmed Zheng and his crew.

"Actually, we were their sidelights," Zheng said.

This time everything went smoothly. Several months later when Zheng returned to Beijing for film-editing he had enough material for a 100-minute documentary.

But still he felt he had not shot enough.

"Life itself is too complicated and abundant. I could only record a small and shallow part of it," he said.

As to the questions that had been haunting him, he said he found answers of soughts.

"Of course Zhou did not give me any direct answers. But the days I spent with them were already enlightening enough," Zheng said.

He said Zhou Yuanqiang and his fellow villagers played a game when they saw the documentary.

"After finding their relatives or friends on the screen, they kept laughing. They were having fun while playing the game," Zheng said. "I guess that is the attitude we all should have."

Actually, the game the villagers played has become an inalienable part of their lives.

For years during screenings of the kung fu series, the villagers and their families have been playing spot the relative on film.

"If you put together the movies they made over the years you will find some interesting contrasts. You might find the lady in a movie shot this year is the girl from a movie shot 10 years ago. The tapes records life's changes," Zheng said.

He was deeply impressed with Zhou's talent for making films.

According to Zheng, Zhou began directing and editing with local farmers as actors in 1984 with a small video camera that he bought with borrowed money.

Most of the series are Red Army stories and farmer comedies. The budget is low, the actors are all amateurs but the series enjoys ever-growing popularity among locals -- even after 12 years.

Without an editing machine, Zhou had to play tape from a video recorder on a TV set and record the scenes into another video recorder. To mix in sound effects, he cut an audio line into two, one for music and the other for dubbing.

"Zhou was born to have a way of thinking in film scenes while others tend to think in the form of literature," Zheng said.

"He is a person of filming talent. Without any academic background and professional experience, he independently studies the art of filming. His hard work and talent are incredible."

With the materials he shot, Zheng edited a 92-minute documentary, which he said is a sympathetic homage to Zhou.

"If he lived more than 100 years ago, he would be DW Griffith, an influential director in early American film history," Zheng said.

Titled DV China (Yige Nongmin de Daoyan Shengya), the documentary received favorable reviews when it was shown last year on CCTV's Movie Channel.

Last month it won silver at a film festival in Austria.

(China Daily November 8, 2004)