A scene from My Mountain Vulture. Photo: Courtesy of Liu Yi?

In Los Angeles, filmmakers this week downed champagne and talked about multi-million dollar budgets as they hopped into limousines and drove from caviare party to caviare party in designer clothes.

In Shanghai two Chinese filmmakers sipped water and talked about making films with budgets of a very few thousand yuan. They were sitting in the crowded Vienna Café, in Shaoxing Road with 20 or so foreigners and locals waiting anxiously for a screening. The café is the home for a month-long festival of independent documentaries.

Unlike the plush interiors of the Hollywood cinemas for the stars and their state-of-the-art screens, the Vienna Café screen showed the first documentaries with a distracting green border because the filmmakers' DVDs were not completely compatible with the technology there. But that did not matter to the audience, who applauded loudly and debated each film with enthusiasm.

The documentary festival director Liu Yi is an independent filmmaker herself, who thoroughly understands the difficulties of independent filmmakers in this country and wants to provide a platform for their works.

"Unlike overseas, there are few organizations that fund independent films in China. Some non-governmental foreign organizations help if the director's film has won prizes at foreign film festivals, but a lot of the Chinese independent films never get the chance," Liu said.

Another filmmaker, Yao Yuan, told the Global Times that a lack of funds was her biggest problem.

She had made two documentaries, but after paying for everything involved in the filmmaking herself she had to find a job.

"I have not made films for long time because now I have a full-time job in a media company. Making films needs a lot of time and, just as importantly, money. I don't have the money to keep going," Yao said.

Liu said that because of the expense of living in the city, only a few Shanghai filmmakers survive in the industry. Most of the country's indie filmmakers come from Yunnan Province where it is cheaper to live.

Beijing, Guangzhou and Nanjing are also good cities for indie filmmaking although it is hard to discover how many filmmakers are working throughout the country.

Many of these filmmakers do their own research and pay for their own travel and accommodation when they go out of town to make their films. They are often just one or two-handed projects.

Screening venues and promoting and marketing the films are also problematical. Liu said that most independent films are not officially approved for screening in public cinemas. Instead they are shown in film festivals or at universities. Even fewer make it to DVD stores.

Not controversial

For this festival Liu selected films made by young independent filmmakers within the past five years and insisted that the works must not be controversial.

"I want to give the audience a picture of a diverse and changing China. Some foreign viewers have formed a bad stereotype of China," Liu said.

Yao backs this careful approach: "I want to give people hope in my documentaries by focusing on ordinary people and their interesting stories. There are too many heavy serious independent films. Some filmmakers make films about controversial subjects because these help them win prizes at foreign film festivals. This is sad."

Liu believes that there are many more important films to be made and topics to be covered. Her festival has featured a variety of subjects including ethnic minority groups in the films, My Mountain Vulture and Yimi Away from Home, and rich people in Red And Blue.

My Mountain Vulture shows the unique relationship between Tibetan monks and mountain vultures. The vultures are slowly starving because their traditional food, the bodies of yaks, is no longer left for them to feed upon. Yimi Away from Home is the story of a Mosuo ethnic family in Yunnan Province who causes a stir by selling their spiritual home to a foreigner.

At the Vienna Café tomorrow night the festival will screen Yao Yuan's The City Symphony, a documentary about the Shanghai City Symphony, an amateur orchestra in Shanghai, which plays for charity.

The orchestra's players come from all walks of life, and include businessmen, IT specialists and retirees. It was created by Cao Peng, a distinguished 87-year-old musician who helps keep the orchestra running with his own money. The orchestra is seen rehearsing and later playing for a group of autistic children.