There was a time when mainland authorities would have considered Zhao Liang persona non grata. After graduating from the Beijing Film Academy in 1994, the 39-year-old made several documentaries about subjects which government officials preferred to hide from public scrutiny. He filmed drug-addled punk musicians, revealed police brutality in a small town near China's border with North Korea, and followed the plight of wronged villagers who braved state-sponsored beatings and belligerence as they attempted to air their grievances in Beijing.
While these films were largely banned on the mainland, they were warmly received abroad. Zhao's career reached its pinnacle in 2009 when Petition - the piece about the abused and aggrieved villagers - was shown as an out-of-competition entry at the Cannes Film Festival.
Another year, another festival. Four months ago, Zhao was in Berlin to introduce his latest film, Together. Again, Zhao has zeroed in on a social group which remains on the margins of mainland life. The documentary explores the difficulties Aids carriers face in confronting their own physical conditions and also in how others see them.
Unlike two years ago, when Petition premiered at Cannes with barely a mention in the country's mainstream media, Together's German adventure was documented thoroughly in print and online, with the film praised for having 'warmed Berlin'. The film also premiered in Beijing to much fanfare last month, with Zhao sharing the stage with government officials who never would have been seen near the filmmaker in the past.
And the officials were there for a reason: Together was commissioned by mainland health authorities as part of a drive to eradicate widespread public misconceptions about the disease - a situation which, ironically, was partly of the government's own making over the years as it stridently kept the issue out of public discourse.
Together is a complementary film to Gu Changwei's fictional feature Love for Life, a blockbuster romantic drama starring Aaron Kwok Fu-shing and Zhang Ziyi as two Aids-infected villagers who defy their condition and social ostracisation to get married. He's a recent divorcee; she's unable to get her otherwise disapproving husband to sign separation papers.