Mainland cinema is never short of stories about the poor. Acclaimed director Zhang Yimou, for instance, won his first international award with Red Sorghum, the story of a young woman's life at a sorghum distillery, and Jia Zhangke is remembered for depicting hard-working migrant workers in Still Life.
But one thing sets Gan Xiao'er apart from other mainland Chinese filmmakers: he's a Christian and he makes films inspired by his religious beliefs. After his wrenching account of spiritual salvation in a farming village in southern China in his debut, The Only Sons, in 2003, he has gone further in his second and latest feature, Raised from Dust, the tale of Xiaoli, a rural Christian woman.
As a poverty-stricken farmer, Xiaoli is burdened not only by the mounting hospital bills of her sick husband, but also pressure to pay tuition fees for their nine-year-old daughter. She chooses to give up treating her husband, despite her Christian faith. Set in a Christian community in a village in Henan province, it's the first Chinese film about Christians on the mainland.
'No Chinese films have dealt with the spiritual lives of farmers ... but I'm not willing to shoot [a film about] a farmer without any spiritual activity because it's not the way he is in real life,' the 37-year-old director says.
Making a film about Christians is difficult, even dangerous, on the mainland. There are perhaps 130 million Christians in the country, a number that has surged in recent years, but Christianity is still a taboo subject. The government suppresses religion as it fears challenges to its supremacy. In 2006, documentary filmmaker Wu Hao was jailed for five months for shooting a film about underground churches, and a strict censorship regime means it's almost impossible to get official approval to make films about Chinese Christians.
Gan's film was made without permits, shot in 2005 in his hometown, Xin Village, in Henan, where more than 10 per cent of the population is Christian. His parents are both teachers and devout Christians. Their guanxi - or personal network - helped Gan a lot. Dozens of his father's former pupils are local officials and his mother has good connections with the church.
