Having just returned to Beijing, Wang Chao said he still feels the pain of Cannes. Not from a disappointing showing at the French film festival, but from sunburn.

A copy of poster for Wang Chao's lastest work "Day Night" [file photo]

"I didn't put on suncream. The sunburn is still really painful!" he said in an interview at a teahouse.

Wearing a Cannes 2006 T-shirt and a radiant glow from his spell in the Riviera sunshine, Wang told Reuters that time spent indoors at the festival was less physically taxing.

"Seeing my film on screen was just great," the bespectacled, mid-forties director said between sips of tea.

"The audience cheered long and hard after the movie finished and made Tian Yuan feel just like a big, international movie star."

The gallery's enthusiasm for Wang's third movie, "Luxury Car", starring 21-year-old arthouse starlet Tian Yuan, was shared by critics and judges, garnering best film in the festival's sidebar category, "Un Certain Regard".

The acclaim will see Wang's story of a fractured rural family in central China hit cinemas in 15 countries -- and speaks volumes of the West's infatuation with uncompromising tales of modern China.

"Luxury Car" -- written and directed by Wang -- is a story of a man whose wife's dying wish is to see her son.

He returns to the city to search for his son decades after being banished to the countryside for "political incorrectness." There he meets his daughter, a prostitute in a karaoke TV club, played by Tian Yuan.

The film maintains the film maker's fascination with harsh juxtapositions and shares the theme of "hope born out of bad seeds" of his previous two films, "Orphan of Anyang" and "Day Night."