Zhang Zeming could still recall that night in 1992 when he went to a party somewhere in Beijing, a bash thrown to celebrate the wrap-up of production for Farewell My Concubine, the film that eventually propelled its director, Chen Kaige, to the Palme d'Or, Oscar nominations and international acclaim. What began as a reunion - Zhang and Chen were both members of the so-called Fifth Generation Directors to emerge from the mainland in the mid-1980s - quickly turned sour. 'It's one thing learning [from abroad], but it seemed they only took to the bad things - putting on airs, the need for such pompous affairs,' he says.
It's more than just the material excess as he saw it that Zhang found depressing: the 57-year-old says he could not share the 'defeatist attitude' his former colleagues harboured towards their art, referring to what he sees as bloated blockbusters that Chen and Zhang Yimou now revel in.
Zhang Zeming was reaping plaudits for his films at international festivals at the same time the other Fifth Generationers were winning prizes for their gritty and harsh portrayals of rural China: Swan Song, Zhang's Guangzhou-set family drama about the relationship between a musician and his son during and after the Cultural Revolution, won a jury prize at the Turin Film Festival in 1986, just a year after Chen's Yellow Earth won two awards at Locarno and nearly two years before Zhang Yimou's Red Sorghum took the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival.
Born and educated in Guangzhou, Zhang was sent to work on a rubber plantation on Hainan Island in 1968, one of the millions of young students ordered to leave cities to labour in rural backwaters during the Cultural Revolution. It wasn't until 1978 that he returned home, and began to work as a production assistant at the Pearl River Film Studio, while studying Chinese literature at the Guangdong Television University; it was then that he wrote the screenplay to Swan Song, which impressed his supervisors to the extent the studio funded the film.
He would make two more films, Dan Yi and Sun and Rain, before leaving for Britain in 1989, dismayed by the crackdown on the pro-democracy movement that year, only returning to Hong Kong and the mainland in the 1990s. His two films in the 90s - A Date on Portland Street (1994) and Foreign Moon (1995) - had immigrants as protagonists. The latter - funded by Media Asia and co-produced by BBC Films and the British Film Institute - was shot in London. The only other project of his in the past decade was the 10-part The Land of the White Cloud, about the Chinese community in Australia. His first new full-length film in 12 years, Across the Plateau, is a documentary about a spiritual journey into China's hinterlands, as Zhang and his co-director, Paul Liu Baohua, follow seven men and women on their cycling trip from Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu province, through the Tibetan plateau all the way to the base camp at the foot of Mount Everest. While primarily a chronicle of the muscle-breaking and spirit-sapping journey, the film also presents the trip in the context of the tumultuous stories of the seven participants - recorded after their return from their trip - of their past haunted by broken marriages and careers derailed by three decades of political upheavals.
'In a time when material pleasures dominate society, it's hard to find people who seek a meaning to their lives in such a different fashion - it runs against the way the modern individual sees possession of earthly goods as paramount,' says Zhang. He was not with the cyclists the whole way through: he'd been tied up in the development of a screenplay. Liu filmed the first part of the journey, and he eventually rejoined the action in Lhasa. His plans were to take up shooting as the group embarked on the second part of the original plans - a journey through the rugged southwest, with Kunming, capital of Yunnan province, as the destination.