Cao Baoping is visibly nervous as he emerges from the wings of San Sebastian's Principe cinema and ambles centre stage. Unlike most directors at the Spanish city's film festival this year to present their latest work, the Shanxi-born, Beijing-based filmmaker spends most of his short speech pleading with the audience to 'be patient' with his film.
'It's not exactly the type of Chinese film which travels to film festivals,' says Cao, who for the past two decades has been a lecturer at the Beijing Film Academy.
His apprehension is understandable. The Equation of Love and Death lacks gravity-defying action choreography - an element most non-Chinese viewers associate with Chinese cinema these days. Nor does it offer the gritty realism that has propelled many a mainland filmmaker to award-winning fame in the festival circuit.
His film features a crabby female taxi driver searching for a lover who's been missing for four years, a botched drug deal involving two country bumpkins, hair-raising chaos on the motorways of Kunming, and handwriting tests which could have come straight out of a crime thriller.
'This film travels in the terrain lying between the strictly commercial and the arthouse,' says Cao, speaking more than a day after his anxiety-riven pre-screening talk. He appears more self-assured than he did before the Spanish audience, his confidence strengthened by the best new director award he had received two hours earlier from fellow Chinese filmmaker Joan Chen, who headed the prize's jury.
The award gives Equation the boost it needs to secure slots at other international festivals and adds to the commercial success it's enjoyed. The film generated box office receipts of 12 million yuan (HK$13.7 million) in its first week of release, meaning the financial outlay of 10 million yuan has already been recouped. And that was before the win at San Sebastian.
