Xiaolu Guo grew up in south-eastern China, in a remote village that had no books. Her father was put in a camp during the Cultural Revolution and she was raised by her grandparents. "It was a stolen childhood, a lost childhood," she says. As a teenager, she started writing poetry. Her first, Autumn, about a young girl growing up, was published in a national magazine, setting her career as "a wild artist" in motion.
Meeting her today, it is hard not to be reminded of Wendy Hiller in Powell and Pressburger's classic British film, I Know Where I'm Going!. The Chinese director's drive and her determination for recognition are self-evident. She polarises opinion. To her critics, she is a writer and film-maker who panders to western preconceptions about China. To her champions, she is an artist with a unique vantage point: someone steeped in both east and west who can describe with equal authority both life in the most distant backwaters of rural China and day to day existence in a seething, modern-day western city like London.
She herself says that traditional Chinese cinema is too often seen in the west as either political or as exotic. She says she wants her own work to move beyond old stereotypes – to be freer in form, more intimate and more "chaotic". "We in China have never had a movement like the French Nouvelle Vague, with Jean-Luc Godard and Truffaut," she says. "We are very much attached to speaking about our identity but there is very little experiment in form or on style or on exploring the language of film."
This Chinese auteur is a one-woman industry. Quite apart from her films, she has published half a dozen novels, all of which have been translated widely in Europe. (Her latest short-story collection, Lovers in the Age of Indifference, has just been published in the UK.) At the Locarno film festival last summer, She, A Chinese won the main award, the Golden Leopard. Even though it is (at least in terms of its financing and part of its settings) a British film, there hasn't been much rush among the Brits to claim or acclaim her. She, A Chinese was described by reviewers in the film trade press as "miserablist" and cliche-laden, bland, calculated and remote - a manifestly unfair verdict on a film which audiences and the festival's jury clearly relished for its lyricism and lithely impressionistic approach.
Guo cannot hide her frustration at the attitude of the British toward her movie. "I don't think English society or the English market care about the Chinese at all," she says. There is, she says, "no room for east Asian or subtitled third world films."
"This is a very personal film about a village youth who is trying to break with her old peasant identity," she says. She, a Chinese can also be read as an allegory about globalisation. Its heroine Mei (Huang Lu) is a beautiful and very aloof young woman from the same provincial background as Guo herself. She has never been more than five miles away from home. Nevertheless, in the course of the film, we see her strike out first to a nearby town, where she is briefly employed in a clothing factory, and then to Britain. There is no shortage of upheaval in her life. Her mobster boyfriend is murdered. She ends up marrying an elderly English gent. Whatever happens, though, she remains the same impassive presence.
In today's world, it doesn't seem abnormal at all that a young woman from the back of beyond ends up in the UK, and seems to fit in so seamlessly. When everyone from Beijing to London has iPhones and easy internet access, national boundaries don't seem to matter so much. Cultures are mixing together as never before. She, A Chinese doesn't argue that that this is a positive or regrettable trend. The style is more observational than polemical. Mei remains the same distant and detached figure wherever her journey takes her. She is far more taciturn than her creator, who has a strong opinion on almost every subject.
Guo's explains that her blossoming as a young bohemian, her journey from "peasant to artist" as she describes it, began in earnest when she enrolled at the Beijing Film Academy aged 18. "I was angry, I was intellectual, I was full of stories," she says. She was clearly far happier studying film in Beijing than she was at the UK's National Film and Television School, which she later joined. "I didn't like the whole British education at all," she says. "It's very much about a practical approach as to how to make films rather than about a bigger vision. It's capitalism: how to make use of your knowledge, how to present yourself in the film industry rather than to find your own vision and film language."
Whatever her reservations about the approach to film culture in Britain, Guo now seems to relish the conventional grind of film-making and film financing. She's ready to pitch projects to funders and to discuss budgets. "Now I know the difficulties of making a film," she says. She has toughened up after her battles on She, A Chinese and her previous feature How Is Your Fish Today? The challenge, she suggests, is to fight for "your clear artistic vision" at the same time as keeping your backers happy.
She says she didn't stand "Sisyphus-like" against the small army of backers of She, A Chinese. Instead, she tried to understand their points of view. Did she have to make compromises? "Always!" she says. "But I think there remains some truthfulness." She adds that She, A Chinese reflects the circumstances in which it was made. The first half – more freewheeling and relaxed – was shot in China and the second half in the UK. "The country somehow shapes the style of the film, but I refuse to say that the film financing is all just a piece of shit."
Xiaolu Guo says that normal audiences are losing their trust in arthouse films. They're scared of work that they think in advance will be forbidding and austere. In her novels, she says, the emphasis isn't on drama or action: she is more interested in writing in "a personal voice" and presenting a vision which is "very interior" and "truthful". She talks of trying to reach "the soul" of the reader. The challenge is to preserving some of this "personal voice" while working in a collaborative and expensive medium like cinema which "drains" her energy and is somehow less "pure" than writing.
But she isn't giving up on cinema just yet; Guo already has a new feature on the boil. UFO in Her Eyes, again adapted from her own novel, is being made in collaboration with German director Fatih Akin's production company. It's about an anonymous woman from a Chinese village whose life changes after she sees a UFO flying through the sky. Guo describes it as a drama in "a symbolic language close to Kafka's Metamorphosis" which explores how anonymous individuals cope with the rapid social and political changes in contemporary China. She worked on the screenplay in Paris before heading off to China earlier this year to scout locations. Switching countries and cultures, living out of a suitcase, doesn't seem to bother her in the slightest. "People always think there is a culture clash between China and other countries – a culture shock. I don't believe in culture shock."
Her argument is that the conflict is between individuals, not cultures. Two lovers who speak the same language and who understand each other's culture perfectly may still not be able to communicate on a deeper, more intimate level. "Jean-Paul Sartre said that others are hell," she says. "The others are your problem. The others are your hell. I don't think cultural difference is the essential problem for communication."
She, a Chinese is out next Friday.