High attitude

AT FIRST GLANCE, mainland director Lu Chuan doesn't come across as someone who could hold his own on the field of battle. Lanky, pale and wearing a pair of silver-rimmed glasses, Lu is more in the mould of a Chinese intellectual. He looks frail.

But looks could hardly be more deceiving. Lu, who served in the People's Liberation Army for four years, braved Tibet's harsh conditions to make his film Kekexili: Mountain Patrol. But the physical and mental challenges were worth it. Kekexili recently beat the likes of Wong Kar-wai's 2046 to lift the best picture at Taiwan's Golden Horse Awards.

It focuses on a grim subject, unfolding through the eyes of a journalist assigned to report on an armed volunteer patrol's struggle against poachers trading in the hides of endangered Tibetan antelopes, or chiru, whose wool is used to make shahtoosh shawls. The film begins and ends with the death of patrol members and is full of haunting images of antelope being slaughtered and life lost in a quicksand bog. And then there's the rattle of AK-47s.

Considering the scarcity of this kind of mainland movie - one that exposes the country's environmental protection problems - it's almost a miracle it escaped the censors' gaze unscathed. Lu's secret is that he has a canny sense of when to take risks and when to bow before the censors and his investors.

'The original script ends with a Hollywood-style victory - the poachers are killed by the captain of the patrol,' 33-year-old Lu says. 'But when I was in Kekexili, I found the truth behind the story [that the film is based on] was that the captain was killed by the poachers. I deliberated for days and finally decided to go with the reality. I want to tell the truth to the audience, no matter how cruel, bloody, violent and tragic it is.'

Tragedy seemed to shadow the production - making Lu more determined to see it through to the end. Alex Graf, a production manager with Columbia Pictures (co-producers along with the Beijing-based Huayi Brothers), was killed in a car accident on his way back from a set visit in Kekexili, the uninhabited plateau region that borders Tibet, Qinghai and Xinjiang with an altitude of about 5,000 metres.