Roughed up by the officer demanding his dokumenti, Anton throws up. With a horrified response, the officer sends our hero along on his mission against the forces of darkness.

But the question is, who really is the hero? Anton, the morally compromised watchman of light? Or the wise, pleasure-seeking creatures of the night he has pledged to keep in check?

Stylishly shot, brooding, ambiguous and Russian to the core, the 2004 fantasy-action film Night Watch has helped ignite a renaissance in Russian cinema that is reviving the nation's legendary film production facilities and challenging Hollywood's supremacy in the worldwide movie market.

A decade ago, the post-Soviet film industry was all but officially dead. The famous Mosfilm studios, once home to directors Sergei Eisenstein and Andrei Tarkovsky, had packs of stray dogs running in the nearly empty halls.

Then, last summer, Night Watch opened on an unprecedented 325 screens and earned more money in Russia than blockbusters The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Troy and The Day After Tomorrow. It outdrew the American film with which it is most often compared, Matrix Revolutions, by more than one-third.

It wasn't a fluke. In February, an improbable historical adventure set during the 1877 Russo-Turkish War, Turkish Gambit, set new box office records, bringing in US$19.2 million (HK$150) and edging out the latest Star Wars installment as well as Alexander. Not bad for a war most people outside Russia have never heard of.

The figures aren't big compared with those of American blockbusters, which just get started at $100 million. What is unexpected is that these Russian films are out-earning American blockbusters in a market that - for indigenous films - amounted to next to nothing only a few years ago.

The phenomenon has come on the heels of a wave of movie house construction across the country and is as much a story of marketing as production. Audiences in places as disparate as Russia, Poland, Hungary and Turkey are beginning to signal an occasional preference for domestic fare, cast with familiar faces in recognizable locales, over films from faraway Hollywood.

Whether the movies have international legs will become apparent later this year, when Night Watch, which has earned US$16.3 million in Russia, is scheduled to hit the United States in the first major American release of a Russian motion picture.

Fox Searchlight Pictures has also optioned the sequel, Night Watch 2: Chalk of Fate, which director Timur Bekmambetov is shepherding through post-production. He plans to shoot the final part of the trilogy in English in the United States.

"American films since the silent era have dominated the world market. They just made more, and bigger, and better,'' said Anna Franklin, a longtime critic and expert on East European film based in Moscow. "But they always made most of their money in the US and foreign sales were just icing on the cake. All that changed in the 70s, when American budgets started getting so high they absolutely had to make money on the international markets to meet the budget.''

The growing domestic sales figures in Russia and elsewhere represent a reversal, if slight, in the substantial European market share the United States has locked in over the last decade. That domination is the result of years of aggressive marketing and distribution agreements along with the commercial appeal of US-made films.

"There's been a real backlash,'' Franklin said. "People are bored and tired of all these American films. People in Turkey, in Poland and in a lot of countries have started producing their own domestic blockbusters, and these blockbusters are beating the American films at the box office.''

After the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, a world-renowned cinema industry that had produced masterpieces including Eisenstein's Battleship Pot-emkin, Tarkovsky's Solaris and Sergei Bondarchuk's War and Peace with 100 percent state support suddenly found itself cut off at the knees, without financial resources.

Many of the 2,000-odd state-run theaters across the country fell into sordid disrepair. Filmgoers, revolted by the condition of most movie houses, turned to television or pirated videos of American films. One of the strongest moviegoing markets in the world - Russians went to the cinema three times as often as Americans - had evaporated. At the surviving theaters American movies predominated, aver-aging nearly 80 releases a year through the late 1990s.

Mosfilm, the grande dame of the Russian filmmaking world, spun into a steep decline, its 98 acres in the heart of Moscow eventually overgrown with weeds and its soundstages vacant.

"There were empty corridors in-habited by packs of stray dogs,'' said Karen Shakhnazarov, director of this year's The Rider Named Death and the man who, as director of Mosfilm since 1998, is credited with bringing the state-owned studio back.

Russian "art'' films continued to be made. Nikita Mikhalkov's 1994 film, Burnt by the Sun, won a best foreign film Oscar. But virtually no one in Russia saw them until they came out on video.

The turnaround began in 1995, when Kodak, against all odds, opened a glitzy theater in the heart of the capital, the first truly modern movie house in Russia. It had snack bars, even Dolby stereo. Tickets reached US$15 a head and more, and people lined up to buy them.

Since then, a cinema building boom has continued unabated. New multi-plexes have sprouted up in the sprawling shopping malls on Moscow's periphery and in the regions, from Novosibirsk to Nizhny Novgorod.

Today there are 713 screens in 420 cinemas across Russia, and there may be four times that many built in the next two years. Ticket sales have leapt from US$18 million in 1999 to US$268 million last year.

To be sure, Hollywood has raked in the biggest share of the box office. The Russian market grew from a paltry US$10 million a year in 1999 for US filmmakers to more than US$215 million last year. Since 2003, Russia has been one of the top 15 markets in the world for American films.

``When I became the director of the studio, we were 20 or 30 years behind the rest of the world in terms of technology and equipment. But there was nowhere to take money from,'' Shak-hnazarov said. ``No one was lining up to give us a bank loan. No one even believed that the restoration of Mosfilm was a viable task.''

The studio head turned to the one asset he had: The amazing library of Russian classics gathering dust in storerooms. Many of them, especially old comedies, still had earnings potential on TV.

``All the money we were getting from selling these movies to television we would invest in renovation of the fleet. We were buying cameras, lights - we didn't have anything. We tried to purchase top-of-the-line, and implement only the breakthrough and innovative technology in our work,'' he said.

``Today, Mosfilm is turning a profit. Russian film managers hope to lure American crews to Moscow and organize Russian-American co-productions.''

Shooting is under way on the first full co-production, Roland Joffe's Captivity. The psychological thriller is being filmed on a Mosfilm soundstage with an American cast and a Russian production company, Ramco, which has partnered with producer Mark Damon's Foresight Unlimited.

``The barrier for attracting important American and international production to Russia had been a formidable one,'' Damon said. ``I realized that in order to break this down, we would have to come to Russia with a very strong director, a strong project, a strong cast, and once they saw that a film of this level, this kind of talent, was shooting in Russia, all the barriers would come down.

``They have. I have received so many proposals from all over Hollywood: `Are you interested in shooting in Russia?'''

The shooting has not been without hitches. The Russian boom operator couldn't understand the dialogue well enough to position the mike; the camera, bought for Russian productions, which do not shoot direct sound, had to be outfitted with a makeshift noise shield; the set itself had to be designed by e-mail while Joffe was still in New York.

Night Watch and Turkish Gambit producers Konstantin Ernst and Anatoly Maximov at First Channel credit Mosfilm's upgraded facilities for their ability to deliver films that look much like high-tech Hollywood productions for a fraction of the expense.

Night Watch cost just US$4.2 million. Turkish Gambit was shot for $3.5 million. Its huge, Gladiator-like battle scenes were filmed with a few extras multiplied many times over by computer imagery.

Yet the budgets for promoting the films might have reached US$7 million each, according to Russian cinema insiders. The big opening week-ends were attributed largely to a US-style marketing strategy that encom-passed print, billboard and television advertising along with gimmicks ranging from T-shirts to coffee table books and calendars.

Another key part of the equation was a deal with Russia's infamous DVD pirates that provided rights to legal production of Night Watch DVDs at a discount in exchange for delaying the DVD release for four weeks after the theatrical release. In Russia, pirated DVDs often go on sale the same day the movie opens.

As a result, the movie has sold more than one million legal copies on DVD, perhaps four times the usual rate for a US blockbuster in Russia.