Director makes kung fu debut

A well-known name in Western film circles, Chinese director Chen Kaige has now shot a martial arts movie for the first time in his 30-year filmmaking career.

Chen shot to fame with the 1985 drama Yellow Earth. As one of the country's most influential directors, Chen earned an international reputation in the early 1990s, when his movie Farewell My Concubine won the Golden Palm Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1993. It won a Golden Globe for best foreign film a year later.

The veteran director has now turned his attention to wuxia, a genre of martial arts films. Wuxia films were some of the earliest Chinese films to attract the attention of Western moviegoers but in recent years the genre has been in decline.