'Brother Chen' torn between emotions on the road to Wenlou

Mainland director Chen Weijun has mixed feelings about winning a Peabody Award. He says he's happy his film has reached a large audience, but says he's uncomfortable that his success may be stealing attention from his subject.

When Chen won the award last month for his documentary To Live is Better Than to Die, which follows the tragic lives of a HIV-infected peasant family in central China, he became the first Chinese to receive a Peabody - one of America's top broadcasting awards for 'meritorious service by radio and television networks'.

The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in February 2003, and has since been shown on US cable and broadcast channels such as HBO and the BBC.

To Live is Better Than to Die shows how an Aids epidemic in Henan affected one family: Ma Shenyi, his wife, Lei Mei, and their three children. Only the eldest daughter escaped infection. About 65 per cent of the 800 mainly impoverished people in their village of Wenlou were infected with HIV during the 1990s, when they tried to make money by selling their blood.

The full version of the film runs for almost 90 minutes. It opens with the hysterical moans of Lei, in the late stages of Aids. It then goes back and traces her painful decline, from a woman who can recall romantic tales of her youth and her former beauty into a bag of bones towards the end of her life, lying listlessly on a cart, waiting to die, without even the energy to brush flies from her face.

The seasons of the Chinese Lunar calendar are used to trace the family's story. Lei dies on Frost Descent, the day that marks the end of a life cycle for grass and plants. She is buried under an unmarked dirt pile near heaps used to cover other bodies.