With only a handful of films to his credit, Sixth Generation Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke has become one of the world's great master filmmakers, and he has the lack of distribution to prove it. Like many other greats from Orson Welles to Hou Hsiao-hsien, he has struggled to get spectators and his movies together at the same place and the same time. His film Still Life won the Golden Lion at the 2006 Venice Film Festival and promptly sat on the shelf. It received a cautious and limited release in New York earlier this year, but since it never turned up on the West Coast, the San Francisco International Film Festival picked it up as an entry in the 51st fest (after failing to secure it for their 50th), and it opens at the end of this week at the Roxie Cinema. It's by far the best film I've seen in this year's fest, and it probably would have been the best of last year too.

I grew up and lived in Los Angeles for many years, but it was only after I moved away that I began to fully appreciate the tremendous variety of films presented by the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Early this year the Archive launched its first season of programming at the brand new Billy Wilder Theater in the Hammer Museum in Westwood, near the UCLA campus. I haven't been there yet, but it certainly sounds like a fabulous screening facility, and this weekend sounds like a great time to go see a movie (or two or four).

The Archive's New Chinese Cinema series, presented in collaboration with the California Institute of the Arts, gets underway tonight (October 5) with a double bill of Still Life and Dong, two works by Jia Zhangke that tackle a similar subject from both a fictional and documentary perspective. Jia was invited by the artist Liu Xiaodong to document his working process as he created one of his "monumental, fractured paintings." The location was the Three Georges area in China, where a huge dam is being constructed. Jia was inspired by the location to make the feature Still Life and also slightly "fictionalized" the documentary Dong.

The series continues with the US Premiere of Eye in the Sky on Saturday night. Eye in the Sky is the debut film by Yau Nai-hoi, who has written several films for director Johnny To (PTU, Running on Karma, Election). Tony Leung Ka-Fai is a criminal in this one and Simon Yam is a cop in the Surveillance Unit assigned to catch him.

Sunday takes a decided turn toward the independent with Huang Weikai's street musician doc Floating and Yang Heng's debut feature Betelnut, a "gently observational portrait of youthful aimlessness," as described in the program notes. The series continues through October 26 with screenings also taking place at the Roy and Edna Disney/Cal Arts Theater (REDCAT).

Shanghai Dreams, directed by "Emerging Master" Wang Xiaoshuai, centers on 19-year-old Qinghong (Gao Yuan-yuan), who lives in the rural province of Ghizhou with her parents and younger brother. Qinghong's parents came to this poor region at the behest  of the Communist Chinese government, which encouraged workers to leave the cities in order to settle in, and build up, the poorer regions. They were promised a better life, and instead have had a decade or more of poverty, factory work, and dismal rural living conditions. Qinghong's father, who was initially optimistic and happy to serve China by making the move, has in the ensuing decade grown angry and bitter, blaming his wife for talking him into leaving Shanghai. Qinghong's parents, and the other adults who came to this remote village with them, still think of themselves as being "from Shanghai", to differentiate themselves socially from the locals. The parents dream longingly of the day they will return to Shaghai, while their children have grown up in this place and consider themselves locals, thus adding an interesting layer of conflict to the t ypical teenager-parentual unit head-butting present in almost any film that has an adolescent character.