These budding auteurs are not interested in grand narratives and they are not crusading for social change. They're just out to explore the world around them. And digital video technology is making it possible.

Huang's first film, Floating (2005), is a slice-of-life documentary about a young guitarist named Yang Jiwei who plies his trade in the pedestrian under-passes of Guangzhou's central business district. The camera traces Yang as he drifts through two years of his life. It deals unflinchingly with sex, survival, suicide, social discrimination, abortion and police detention.

Digital video (DV) has taken off in China over the last few years and is now popularizing the art of filmmaking. With DV and basic editing software young people like Huang have all the tools at hand to tell stories about the society rapidly changing around them.

"Just say those two words, `digital video,' and young directors go crazy,'' Huang says in his Guangzhou studio, where he is busy putting the final touches to Floating. "Everyone seems to be hailing DV's arrival and its infinite possibilities. DV has done a great deal to help me reach my dream of making films.''

After graduating from art school in 1995, Huang tried to get as close as possible to film. That wasn't easy in China in the days before things went digital. He first offered his services free to Guangzhou's only production studio. When that plan failed, he called every cinema in the local Yellow Pages. "I decided a movie theater was the next best thing. That way I could at least watch movies every day,'' he says.

In 1997, Huang found a job as a graphic designer and devoted his spare time to writing screenplays. The only problem was that no one would read them. Just as he was making a last ditch effort by applying to film schools, digital video hit China and changed all the equations.

"The more I learned about DV, the more film school seemed unnecessary. You spend a lot of time with subjects that are of no use to a filmmaker, like politics and English. I thought that was a huge waste of time. It was better just to buy a DV and do it myself.''

Huang bought his first camera in 2001 and started filming Floating the following year. Now the 31-year-old director supports himself by using his equipment to record parties or other events for corporate clients and devotes the rest of his time to filmmaking.

The shift to DV and the growing richness of indie films in China has prompted comparisons with the French New Wave of the 1960s when the advent of lightweight cameras and faster film stock brought a new generation of filmmakers out of the studio and into the world.

"There is a new kind of freedom emerging [for Chinese film-makers]. They don't trust in-stitutions. They occupy a new space of creat-ivity,'' says Bar-bara Keifenheim, a film-maker and anthropologist who served as a judge at this year's Yunnan Multi-Cultural Visual Forum, or YunFest, where Huang's Floating made its first appearance among scores of other DV films. "It's a bit reminiscent of the 1960s in Western countries,'' she says.

Young filmmakers have found this new creative space outside the confines of China's mainstream media and its apparatus of state control, says Lu Xinyu, a professor of journalism at Shanghai's Fudan University and author of Docu-menting China: The Contemporary Documentary Movement in China.

"They don't go through any of the official production channels recognized by the state. So in this way they escape scrutiny,'' Lu says.

Censors in China must still approve screenplays for traditional movies before production goes forward. But DV films like Huang's are not regarded as proper films by the authorities because they are low-budget affairs and don't reach a mass audience. For the same reason, gatherings like YunFest do not bill themselves as "film festivals.''

If the nature of distribution changed, sensitivities might arise, says Lu. "But right now these are just being played in a number of closed events, like Yun-Fest. There's no problem so long as they don't enter mainstream media.''

So far these films are shown mostly at university forums, events such as YunFest, and through a growing number of community Web sites such as the Beijing Film Acad-emy's 22film.com, China Documentary Network (www.cnjlp.tv) and http://cn.cl2000.com/film (Avant-Garde Film).

Many of these films are strikingly candid in their depiction of Chinese society. Their motivation for truth-seeking, says Lu, is at least in part a reaction against the false images and idealized views projected by the media and mainstream cinema.

In part they are also a reaction against the state-approved documentaries of the 1980s and 90s that took a top-down perspective on Chinese life. Young filmmakers today are far more in-terested in letting their subjects speak for themselves.

"The difference between film-makers today and those in the past is that they want to enter into and examine the lowest levels of Chinese society,'' says Lu.

Keifenheim calls it the death of the hero.

"We are really seeing the end of the big heroes in China, and the emergence of the anti-heroes,'' she says.

"It's now about the people and their actual lives.''

Cheng Long, a 23-year-old engineering student in the northern Chinese city of Harbin and director of The Ice Men, agrees there has been a dramatic shift in perspective.

"Before, directors would make grand films or documentaries about eminent scientists or other model characters. Now we care much more about the lives of ordinary people,'' he says.

Cheng's own first film, which takes a behind-the-scenes look at the famous ice carvers who work their magic each year at Harbin's grand Ice Festival, is a good case in point.

This explosion of points of view is key to understanding what's happening in Chinese filmmaking right now, says Andrea Stelzner, a Kunming-based photographer working as an organizer with Lijiang Studio, a local arts venue. Stelzner says it's not just about new issues, but about the way filmmakers are treating them.

"You can see prostitution, police corruption or organized crime every day on Chinese television. But they [the filmmakers] tell you what the moral lessons are. That's why DV is so important. Young Chinese can film what's going on around them, and they can do it scientifically,'' she says.

Lu says the new documentary movement is playing an important role in seeing that the voices of ordinary people are not shut out of contemporary Chinese history. And she says she expects both topics and perspectives to continue expanding.

"Documentaries in China will show incredible variety 10 years from now. They will begin to touch on important social topics not addressed by China's mainstream media. There will also be lots of very personal films, with young directors exploring their own lives.

"Questions like, `Who am I?' Stories about one's own fate, or the fate of one's family. The lives of rural Chinese, ordinary Chinese, industrial workers and ethnic minorities will continue to receive close attention,'' says Lu.

But even if films touch on sensitive issues, Huang Weikai says politics and social change are the furthest things from the minds of most directors.

"Maybe you should call me a naive director,'' he says with a broad smile. "I'm not interested in crusading with my films. For me, it's all about personal interest. Of course, if I run across a very real issue while I'm making a film I'll face it head on.''

Hu Xinyu, the straight-talking director of The Man, a film that brashly explores the life of the Chinese bachelor awash in a hormone-drenched habitat of arrogance and pornography, says most younger filmmakers are just out to do what interests them.

"One obvious difference [with this generation of filmmakers] is that they're not political at all. They don't want to cause trouble,'' says Hu, a full-time music teacher in Taiyuan in northwestern Shanxi province.

"I'm the same way. I don't give a damn about politics. The most important thing is human contact. I'm interested in the way people interact. I'm interested in life. Actually,'' Hu says after a pause, "I'm interested in my own life.

"I'm extremely self-centered. Some people think I overdo it. But my film is just how I see people. I could be completely wrong but I still have to say it.''

The Man was too raw for some audience members at YunFest, where it won the top prize this year. Hu recalls that about a third of the audience walked out during the first few minutes of the film's screening.

"Older audience members couldn't accept it. But I think younger women could accept it because it's real. My film can teach them what men are really like,'' he says.

Back in Guangzhou, I ask Huang whether young directors such as he ever worry about the dangers of raising sensitive or taboo issues in their films. The question baffles him. "I haven't given much thought to what might happen.

"If you love chocolate, you're not going to ask yourself if eating it will make you fat. You just eat it without thinking. Filming with digital video is just like that. I film what interests me. I was interested in the life of a street musician, so I made a film about him,'' he says. "Just like eating chocolate.''