In 1944, an American journalist snapped a photo of a young girl in an oversized army uniform riding a roofless freight train. The train was speeding along, and the baby-faced girl looked lost.The photograph remained largely unknown to the public, but for Yang Shuping, it was the inspiration that led to the filming of his debut movie, The Cold Flame.

"I was so deeply impressed by the photo that I always wanted to produce a film about the girl," Yang said during the film's premier in Beijing. "1940 was a very hard time for the whole nation; people were fighting to survive the lengthy war and were anxiously anticipating the end of it."

Rather than telling a story about the brave soldiers fighting with their lives in the battlefields, Yang approaches the events of the time from the perspective of a troublemaking girl.

"I hope my audience can see an even more heartbreaking story behind the girl's lies and love," he says.

Orphaned and displaced by the war with Japan, a 14-year-old Chinese girl clings to her little brother and her dignity. The plot thickens when she begins expressing her love for an army officer through a myriad of blatantly overt lies.

Indeed, the 37-year-old self-taught writer-director seems much more interested in romantic conflicts than in military ones.

The girl (Gong Siyu, pictured above) falls in love with an older, badly injured army officer (Zhang Hanyu, above). She helps him dress his wounds, all the while spinning a web of lies in hope of winning his love.

But the object of her affections cannot find it in his fatherly heart to return her love.

The incredible age difference between the two main characters is one of the central themes of the film.

"When children grow up and learn about sex and love, many of them become interested in the people around them, especially adults," Yang says.

Most of the plotline plays out as part of a flashback to the time immediately following the war's official end in November of 1945.

Eventually, Xue is forced to move on. At the same time, the city is swarmed with retreating Japanese soldiers, bringing the drama to its tragic climax. "I have taken the opportunity to talk to many women in hopes of understanding how they, as young girls, approached their first loves," he says. "The answers vary dramatically. Many would be elusive in dealing with their emerging feelings of love, and some would try to capture the attention of the men they were interested with fibs and fits. This is what I depicted the film."

Yang also drew from his personal experiences with his brother.

"I used to treat him like he was my personal property. I'd take advantage of him and even humiliate him, and I'd protect him from danger," he says. "I used this relationship as the basis for the interactions between the girl and her brother."

Before his film debut, Yang worked a number of odd jobs, ranging from firefighting to news reporting. But this jack-of-all-trades clearly benefited from his studies at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, where he majored in painting. The Cold Flame is aesthetically brilliant, and Yang is acutely attuned to the visual powers of color, composition and light.

Having worked in television for more than a decade, he chose a wartime romance as his first feature, because he was a huge fan of war films during his childhood.

"I might be the only child who watched films in bed," he says. "My father worked as a projectionist when I was growing up, and I remember he would play films for me when I was in sick in bed. So, I was heavily exposed to cinematography from the age of 6."

Those flicks made a deep impression on the young Yang that shows through in his first feature.

He shot The Cold Flame on a tight budget, making good use of the available studio sets. The entire film was shot at the army-owned August First Studio.

And he broke from the conventions of domestic war films by portraying the soldiers in a positive and humanistic light, without making any attempts at political point scoring.

(China Daily 12/26/2007 page6)