Blind Massage, the award-winning latest film by the enfant terrible of Chinese cinema Lou Ye that was released on the mainland last week, throws a rare spotlight on those without sight in a country where the disabled are often marginalised.
Based on Bi Feiyu's popular novel Massage, the drama tells the story of a small blind community working in a therapeutic massage parlour in Nanjing.
In China, home to 85 million disabled people according to state media, the stigma surrounding disability is marked. Schools often deny admission to disabled pupils, contributing to an estimated 40 per cent illiteracy rate in the community. For the 17 million blind, massage offers an escape from poverty and ostracism, and hundreds of thousands of them work in salons and parlours.
"It was a taboo subject - but not any more, it seems to me," Lou said at his film's premiere in Beijing last week. He still had to contend with the state censors, who had repeatedly banned his works, including those that tackled forbidden subjects, such as gay sex and the 1989 Tiananmen protests.
But "we managed to get it through after four or five months of discussions", the "Sixth Generation" filmmaker says. "The version the [mainland] audience will see is a bit different from the original. We had to take out the most sexual and violent images. I can understand why we had to do that, because mainland cinema doesn't have an age classification system."
Starring both sighted and unsighted actors, Blind Massage explores the lives and loves of the masseurs, with some scenes deliberately blurred to give the viewer a sense of having poor vision. Desperation is never far from their lives, and some parts of the film - including mutilations - are shocking.