), who has run away from home and works as a "betelnut beauty," hawking betelnut -- a chewing pepper that gives a marijuana-like high -- from a roadside stand.Feng gets involved with the gangsters who infest this roadside world, and ends up dead.
Fei-fei is accidentally discovered by the entertainment industry, making a breakthrough as a singer but calling vainly on the phone to reach the vanished Feng.
Producer Peggy Chiao said the goal was to provide a new look at the changing China in different political regimes.
While mainland China is "turning from a communist to a capitalistic society," Taiwan was veering from capitalism to a more social-oriented system, she said.
Film director and writer Ling Cheng-sheng, who made his breakthrough in movies while working as a baker, said his work is part of a "tales of three cities" package that will feature six feature films by directors from Beijing, Taipei and Hong Kong.
"Inugami", in contrast, takes a fantastical leap to be -- in Japanese director Masato Harada's words -- a "Hitchcock thriller, a supernatural thriller" set in the mountains of Japan.
It tells the story of the Bonomiya family through which local gods -- the Inugami of the title -- manifest themselves following an incestuous relationship between a mother (played by Yuki Amami) and her son (Atsuro Watabe).
Harada said the story is meant to symbolize the corruption he sees in modern-day Japan, personified by Takanao, the father of the Bonomiya family (played by Kazuhiro Yamaji), who is ready to sell the family land in order to pay off his debts.
He told reporters that the story on which the film was based originally had the Bonomiya family lynched, but the movie ends instead with a mass suicide attempt as this is a "better model for Japan today."
A tough proposition for cinematic release at the best of times, Harada said the film's "disastrous reception" when it opened in Japan two weeks ago was more symptomatic of a bean-counting approach to film-making.
The great directors of the past, such as Kurosawa, had flourished under a studio system but now corporations finance movies, all the time keeping costs under strict control, he said.
The result is that the time needed to develop screenplays, shoot the movie and put it through post-production are all too short, and each phase is completed with too few resources.
As an example of his problems, he said that for one 10-day period shooting on an island, he could only give the cast cold boxed meals instead of hot food.
"Betelnut Beauty" and "Inugami" are among the five Asian films competing for the Berlinale's top prize, the Golden Bear.
They are up against another 18 films from around the world, including "Traffic", a US movie on the drug trade that has been nominated for several Oscars.
No crouching tigers at Berlin film festival (2001-02-14)1 (11285)
