Festival Watch: Berlin

Zhang Yimou's martial-arts epic Hero (the most successful film in Chinese history, and this week nominated for an Oscar) is causing the director a world of trouble. As in the much more intimate films which made him famous in the West and turned Gong Li into an international star, (Raise the Red Lantern and Ju Dou among them), Zhang plays extraordinary games with colour. The problem – at least in the eyes of his detractors – is that Hero also has a strong political undertow.

The story is set in the so-called "warring states" period more than 2,000 years ago, when the country was divided into seven kingdoms, each battling for supremacy. The most powerful and ruthless leader was the King of Qin, the tyrant who became China's first emperor – and who was responsible for the building of the Great Wall.

Zhang treats this despot with kid gloves. Throughout the film, various assassins (including Jet Li) try to kill him. If he orders the execution of men he admires and respects, it's because he has no choice. True, he has a huge and terrifying army, led by thousands of black-clad archers with a taste for blood, but as played by Chen Daoming, he's a temperate man. "Obviously, the Emperor could have decided not to kill [the assassins], but he had to maintain respect and save face," Zhang pleads.

To Zhang's dismay, certain critics have read Hero as a veiled fable about modern-day China. Some even claim to see it as an allegory about Tiananmen Square, in which the film-maker is taking the side of the state against the dissidents.

Premiered last year in Beijing, Hero has received the official seal of approval. This is quite an irony when one considers that a generation ago, Zhang was one of the leaders of the so-called Fifth Generation, a group of film-makers constantly at loggerheads with the authorities.

Zhang dismisses the suggestion he has become an Establishment stooge. "All my films have been criticised, with the exception of the one I just made about the [Beijing] Olympics, which was only a few minutes long. It's something I've just had to get used to. If you go on to the internet, it's very filthy what they say [about my work]. But what can you do? You just have to take it."

He claims that Hero is simply his tribute to the kung fu literature he devoured as a kid. "It was not my intention to make a political film – it would not be right to politicise the film," he insists.

Some believe he is being disingenuous. "Politics is bound up with the very act of film-making in China," says Richard James Havis of the South China Morning Post. "It's difficult to think that any director working in China wouldn't consider the political implications of his work."

There is something contradictory about the pleasure Zhang takes in showing the Emperor's soldiers at work, unleashing their arrows, crushing their opponents and then showing the Emperor as a man of peace. "But if he'd made the film the opposite way and projected the king as cruel and brutal, he'd have been attacked too," says Maggie Cheung, who plays an assassin called Flying Snow. "Some people are just jealous of Zhang Yimou's success. His films have always been banned or unwelcome in China. Now, Hero is welcome and is doing well, and so some envious people are saying he's kiss-assing the government to get where he is. I don't take these attacks seriously. I'm just happy that Hero is being talked about."

Variety's senior critic Derek Elley agrees, arguing that it's absurd to lambast Zhang Yimou for making a popular, mainstream film. The same criticisms, he says, have recently been levelled at Zhang Yuan, another director revered by Western critics and festival programmers when he was making "underground" movies such as his Venice Prize winner, 17 Years, but now dropped because he has had the temerity to make officially approved films such as his new, Fatal Attraction-style thriller, I Love You.

"People there are very sensitive and sometimes overreact. Some view it as propaganda because it's so for the Emperor," agrees director Mabel Cheung (whose new film Traces of the Dragon: Jackie Chan and His Lost Family also premiered in Berlin). But she adds that it's irrelevant whether the movie is pro or contra the government. "It doesn't really matter, as long as it's a good film, which it is."