Parking went on to receive positive reviews at Cannes, where it was screened in the Un Certain Regard competition, and several other festivals around the world, before returning home to open last month's Golden Horse Film Festival in Taipei.

Chung's film is not a commercial blockbuster, but still boasts an impressive cast of Taiwan's leading actors, including Chang Chen, Kwai Lun-mei, Leon Dai Li-ren and Jack Kao Jie.

The black comedy, which unfolds in the course of an evening in Taipei, centres on Chang's character Chen Mo. He is a nondescript everyman who stops for some cakes on his way home to celebrate Mother's Day with his wife (played by Kwai), only to find his car blocked by a double-parked vehicle.

Desperate to head home - his marriage is under strain because of their inability to conceive a child - Chen Mo heads to an old building nearby to find the driver of the other car. He comes across a string of lowly characters: a one-armed ex-gangster barber (Kao), a little girl raised by her grandparents (Lin Kai-jung), and a pimp (Dai) living off the work of a mainland prostitute (Peggy Tseng Pei-ju).

Chung says his protagonist is representative of many people just getting by in life.

'Chen Mo is a typical bourgeois man, someone who has a nice taste for life. He always looks neat and classy, drives a VW Golf 2, someone like me,' says Chung. 'His life may look peaceful and stable on the surface, but the tension and conflicts are buried deep in his life of mundane triviality.'

Chen's efforts to get his car out of the parking space, the director says, mirror his attempts to free himself from his predicaments, and also the other characters' yearning to get out of their trapped lives.

'Everyone in that building wants to break out of there,' he says. 'But is there always light at the end of the tunnel? I doubt that. Who knows? Maybe it's inside the tunnel that one feels the warmest.

'All human beings are trapped in time and space, within social norms and responsibilities. There's no breaking out of it until you are dead,' he says.

'When the characters finally make changes to their lives, it leads to even more problems. The good thing is, as a director, I don't have to solve them - I merely raise more.'

Parking began its life as part of a trilogy Chung wrote months after finishing his masters' degree in filmmaking at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1994. His plans are to make three films focusing on three holidays in Taiwan - Mother's Day, the Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day.

'I was curious about what exactly people did during these festivals. What's the point of Mother's Day if you are not celebrating it with your mother?'

Chung finally got the opportunity to take his vision to fruition after more than a decade. He insisted on doing everything his own way, going so far as to fire his original cinematographer who he deemed 'too visually oriented'.

'Filmmaking is totally different from making television commercials,' he says.

'Ads are all about making a visual impact, whereas in films, what really matters is the plot and the characters. I won't compromise those qualities in my films, even if I have to cast aside the visual techniques I'm more familiar with.'

He ended up working as Parking's cinematographer himself, using only one zoom lens for all the shots in the film. Still, Parking is filled with strong saturated colours and accentuated contrasts - a homage, Chung says, to John Huston's monochrome classics such as The Maltese Falcon.

The film might be set in Taipei, but the characters are also from the mainland and Hong Kong. Tseng's character, for example, ended up in Taiwan as a victim of human trafficking. There's also a Hong Kong-born tailor, played by Chapman To Man-chak, who returns to Taipei to sell his father's business there. What ties the many characters together is their shared confusion about life in a modern urban society.

The infertility issue which threatens to break up Chen Mo's marriage, Chung says, shows the 'extreme insult' women are subjected to while undergoing gynaecological check-ups; the emergence of single-parent families and its fallout is revealed in the thread revolving around Lin Kai-jung, whose father is executed for murder.

Although the film's multiple strands are driven by dramatic twists, Chung says he strove to avoid emotional histrionics. 'I hope audiences can interpret the emotions and meanings by themselves,' he says.

'I want to just create an atmosphere. Even though you don't see bloodied bodies scattered around, you can still sense [the turmoil] hidden somewhere deep within the story.'

Parking might be Chung's first feature film, but the 43-year-old is no stranger to life as a director. He has made more than 100 television commercials and music videos.

He also made Doctor, a documentary about a father's bereavement. Such experiences, however, scarcely prepared him for his work on Parking.

'I feel much less pressure making television commercials - it's like celebrating the Spring Festival [the Lunar New Year] as compared to making feature films,' says Chung, who spent every night during production amending his screenplay for next day's shooting.

His teenage years were spent watching either Bruce Lee movies or Hong Kong comedies starring Michael Hui Koon-man, rather than art house productions.

His love of film came during his high school days when he saw Nagisa Oshima's Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence - specifically the scene in which David Bowie, playing a British prisoner of war in the second world war, kissed his Japanese captor, played by Ryuichi Sakamoto.

'I never heard of homosexuality before watching the film,' says Chung. '[The scene] made me realise that films are more than just a mix of sounds and images - they can also [offer audiences] fresh and brilliant ideas.'

But it was only after graduation from National Chiao Tung University - where he studied computer engineering - that Chung decided to delve into filmmaking.

'I wanted to make films since high school, but film production education in Taiwan wasn't satisfying,' he says.

'When I went to college, I thought I'd find a stable job and become an engineer. When I finished school, I figured that's not the way I want to live. So I went to study filmmaking in Chicago.'

The success of Parking has vindicated his decision to change careers and Chung is now working on several projects, including a thriller about children growing up.

'I want to make a children's film, but not something of the Disney kind,' he says.

'I want to portray how adults influence the growth of children. So prepare to see yourself as seen by the eyes of a child.'

Parking opens today