By KIRK SEMPLE

BEIJING - Over the course of six years Zhao Dayong, an independent filmmaker from Guangzhou, China, spent many months living among the residents of Zhiziluo, an impoverished and forgotten village in the rugged mountains near the Myanmar border, and filming their lives.

Using his own money and simple digital filmmaking equipment he made “Ghost Town,” a quiet, hypnotizing, three-hour documentary that provides an intimate portrait of Chinese life.

Like independent filmmakers everywhere, Mr. Zhao worked with no guarantee of an audience, or even a place to show his work. By his estimates only a few thousand people have seen “Ghost Town” in China since he finished it last year. Several hundred saw it in late September when the film had its international premiere at the New York Film Festival.

But what makes Mr. Zhao’s commitment particularly noteworthy is that his project was apparently illegal.

The Chinese government has decreed that all films must be approved by government censors before being distributed and screened, including in overseas film festivals.

Mr. Zhao, 39, said getting the approval of the censors was never a consideration. “It’s like asking to be raped,” he said in an interview. “The government certainly has its own agenda. They want us to stop. But at the same time we know we’re doing something meaningful.”

An underground filmmaking subculture emerged in China in the late 1980s, but it began to flourish only about a decade ago with the advent of inexpensive digital cameras and postproduction computer programs that helped put filmmaking further out of reach of the authorities.

Many of this latest generation of Chinese filmmakers have no formal film training and shoot on minimal budgets.

Several leading filmmakers put the annual production of unsanctioned films at fewer than 200. But this work has provided views of China that possess an unvarnished authenticity often missing from mainstream films.

About 20 filmmakers have been banned from making films for two to five years, according to Zhang Xianmin, an independent film producer and a professor at the Beijing Film Academy. Others have received intimidating phone calls, had tapes confiscated or been detained.

But according to several filmmakers and film scholars both here and abroad, the government recently appears to have adopted a somewhat hands-off, though highly watchful, posture toward this film vanguard.

It seems that as long as certain incendiary topics are not broached - among them the Tiananmen Square massacre, Tibet, the Cultural Revolution - then independent filmmakers are allowed to work.

“You don’t know where that limit is,” said Zhang Yaxuan, a critic and documentary filmmaker. “You have to try to touch it. In the process of trying, you know.”

The most accomplished filmmakers have found their largest audiences overseas.

“I feel very frustrated,” Mr. Zhao said. “I’m a Chinese filmmaker, and of course my audience should be the Chinese people, especially since my films are about ordinary working Chinese people.” He added, “That would be more valuable than winning an international film festival.”


SHIHO FUKADA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES / Zhao Dayong released “Ghost Town” without state approval.