June (Li Jia) suffers another tense meal with her widowed father (Wang Deshun) in Yin Lichuan’s The Park.	Dasam (Wu Gang) examines the unsavory contents of the stray trunk in Wang Fen’s surreal tale of repressed small town desires, The Case.	Lola Zhang, producer of the Yunnan New Film Project. In 2006 Lola was named one of China’s “Top 20 Most Influential Female Media Personalities” by Variety magazine.

PRODUCER Lola Zhang calls her Yunnan New Film Project a “long march,” an apt description for a project that will require years to complete and the traversing of countless obstacles. Comprising 10 films by 10 young female directors drawn from a range of creative fields, Lola has asked each to craft a work set and shot in the tropical southern province of Yunnan.

So what motivated Lola to undertake such a mammoth task? She comes from a background in arts-related documentary making and conceptual photography, which may go some way to explaining her unconventional producing style. But the Yunnan project is not the first time Lola has helmed such a scheme.

A job at an investment company at the turn of the decade led to her formulating the New Film Project for Chinese Directors, an earlier series of 10 works designed to give emerging talent a leg-up into the industry. Lola was later inspired to take the series concept further when a shoot in Yunnan piqued her interest in the area. The province’s lush vegetation and humidity are a world away from Beijing’s desert clime.

The first two Yunnan films rolled off the production line last year, and have since screened at a swathe of festivals around the globe. They differ markedly in tone and style, suggesting Lola’s strategy of using directors from a variety of artistic backgrounds is paying dividends in terms of diversity. “I think when their different backgrounds combine with their films there will be some chemical reaction,” explains Lola. “This reaction is good for filmmaking, and also good for art.”

The Case (Xiangzi) is a startling tale of repressed small town desires by documentary filmmaker Wang Fen. After Lola whittled her initially broad list of potential directors down to 10, she took her team south and allowed the creative juices to start flowing in Yunnan’s tropical heat. On the trip Wang Fen stumbled upon a small village nestled at the foot of a mountain near the Vietnamese border. “During the day, the town is a bustling tourist center,” the director recalled at a recent screening in Beijing. “But at night it’s a deserted ghost town.” Intrigued by this duality and the languid tropical ambience, Wang put together a draft script in just two days.

Her dark, absurdist tale focuses on Dasam, a harassed middle-aged man running a small guesthouse with his highly strung wife. Waking one morning to find a suitcase floating in the river outside his window, Dasam excitedly pulls the trunk from the water. Upon forcing it open, he is horrified to find an array of body parts neatly encased in blocks of ice. As the ice melts, Dasam’s repressed desires and obsessions begin to emerge from the murky depths, materializing in the form of a sultry femme fatale who checks into the guesthouse. The film’s final 15 minutes sees the uncertain border between dreams and reality, truth and fiction, life and death become utterly blurred as the narrative folds in on itself in an endless, maddening spiral.

The Case is an uneven film of abrupt shifts that aren’t always successfully pulled off. But it’s also an arresting, darkly humorous work, and a rare attempt to bring a genuinely surrealist spirit into the realm of commercial feature filmmaking.

The second Yunnan film is an altogether more sober affair by writer Yin Lichuan. At the outset, The Park (Gongyuan) feels like another predictable, if well acted, tale of parent-child alienation and generational conflict. But this initial familiarity is misleading. Step by step this understated film evolves into a surprising and deeply moving meditation on the way time corrodes our dreams and expectations.

June is a 29-year-old TV presenter living in Yunnan’s capital Kunming. In the opening scene her visiting elderly widowed father finds her asleep in the arms of her boyfriend; lover boy hightails it out the window and dad moves in, doling out constant criticism and gently trying to take control of June’s life. Their relationship goes from bad to worse when June does a story on the matchmaking activities of elders in a local park, and finds dad hawking her details to prospective parents-in-law.

Despite the father’s willful interference in June’s life, The Park manages to skilfully balance viewers’ sympathies across the generational divide. When June finds one of her suitors is a documentary maker who has interviewed her dad about his motivations for being in the park, she demands to see the tape. Her subsequent viewing is beautifully handled in the film’s subtly affecting emotional centerpiece.

The Park’s restrained but emotionally charged melancholic tone builds to a quiet tear-jerker of a finale that wordlessly conveys an aching sense of life’s transience. Superficially a genre melodrama, this small film contains riches that only yield themselves upon multiple viewings.

Although Lola’s executive producer “ET” describes the Yunnan New Film Project as “a kind of modern art,” it is a measure of Lola’s commercial savvy that she has got the Yunnan films financed and achieved distribution, albeit limited, for the two completed titles on China’s mainland. In a story that would be familiar to independent producers worldwide, it has been an uphill battle to get investors and theater chains interested in a series of films by unknown directors devoid of big stars. Lola’s tenacity has paid off, and since early 2008 The Case and The Park have been doing the rounds of cinemas across eastern China. The third Yunnan title, Finding Shangri-la (directed by Taiwanese theater actor and director Ismene Ting) is currently in post-production, while the remaining seven films are in various stages of pre-production.

Low-budget Chinese features over the last few years have largely been disappointing, with the recent Pingguo (Lost in Beijing, director Li Yu) typical of the aimless portrayals of those having a hard time of it in the new China that tend to characterize these productions. On the other hand, the big studios churn out a seemingly endless stream of grandiose historical epics. The first two Yunnan films are something different – modest but memorable slices of low-budget genre cinema that demonstrate what is possible with a small cast and a handful of well used locations. Their success is a tribute not only to the directors’ creative skills, but also Lola Zhang’s creative vision in bringing these diverse talents together. Here’s hoping the remaining seven films maintain the high standard.