Poverty problems in the frame

These days, Zhao Tao moves in glamorous circles. Now a regular on the international film festival circuit with starring roles in films such as Platform, Unknown Pleasures and Still Life, she has graced gala premieres at Venice, Cannes and Berlin. Before winning the best actress title at last year's David di Donatello Awards - the Italian equivalent of the Oscars - for her sterling turn in Andre Segre's Shun Li and the Poet, she was received by Italian President Giorgio Napolitano at the Quirinal Palace in Rome.

But Zhao says it's not the jet-setting lifestyle or the glitz which have made a lasting impression on her. Sitting in a hotel lounge overlooking Victoria Harbour during a recent Hong Kong visit to attend a screening of Shun Li at the Cine Italiano! film festival, the 35-year-old says her most vivid memories are of journeys across the rural hinterlands on the mainland, as she and her husband, director Jia Zhangke, produced their films.

"I remember making Unknown Pleasures in 2002 near Datong [in Shanxi province], and we stopped at this place squeezed between a mountain and a dry riverbed," says Zhao. "There's this highway of sorts and it's covered with coal ash. Next to the road stand some shacks built with flimsy wooden planks and discarded electricity poles. While we were standing there, people came out of them, crossed the road and tried to get water from the riverbed. I was shocked - it's 2002 and there were people who still couldn't live in proper, basic housing?

"If I wasn't making a film, I wouldn't be able to witness the impoverished circumstances some people are still living in. I'm like mostly everyone else: I haven't been extremely rich or extremely poor, leading a very ordinary life. And I thought everybody would be like me but that's not the case."

It's perhaps fitting that the interview is taking place on the 116th floor of the International Commerce Centre: the way she surveys the bustling city below - "It's so … beautiful!" she exclaims - is reminiscent of her screen roles as the oracle of social changes unfolding on the mainland.

In Platform (2000), she plays a young woman whose life embodies the effects of the economic reforms sweeping across the country from the late 1970s to the 1990s. In Still Life (2006), her character, trying to track down her vanished husband, witnesses the fallout from China's self-proclaimed strides towards modernity as she visits a town soon to be submerged as part of the Three Gorges Dam project.