The idea of making a documentary about the 'making of' the film Love for Life, and of entrusting it to the well-known independent documentary-maker Zhao Liang, arose quite early in the development of the screenplay and scenario of Love for Life. However, the documentary soon took on a life of its own, largely as a result of the intervention of the Chinese Ministry of Health, whose financial and political support helped transform it into something resembling a benign propaganda film to signal a new direction in government policy towards HIV/AIDS and, more importantly, the social inclusion of HIV/AIDS sufferers. The film remains an important document of the varied experiences of HIV-positive men and women in contemporary China, but this aspect is largely overshadowed by the political message about the need for greater openness and an end to the secrecy, stigmatisation and exclusion surrounding HIV/AIDS and HIV-positive people in everyday social interactions.

The Director Zhao Liang (b. Dandong, Liaoning Province, 1971), a graduate of the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts in Shenyang who originally specialised in art photography, is one of the foremost practitioners of Chinese 'new documentary'. After making a number of highly evocative 'essay films' and observational documentaries in the late 1990s, of which the best known are Farewell to Yuanminyuang, about the destruction of an artists' colony near the remains of the Summer Palace in Beijing, and Paper Airplane (2001), about the lives of a group of young migrants in Beijing, many of whom have fallen into heroin addiction, Liang turned the spotlight on the administration of criminal justice in China in a series of documentaries beginning with Return to the Border (2005) and continuing with Crime and Punishment (2007) and the highly controversial Petition: The Court of the Complainants (2009). His most recent major work, Behemoth (2015), a 'guerilla documentary' about the ruthless exploitation of labour and the destruction of the grasslands of Inner Mongolia by open-cast coal mining, filmed in images at once beautiful and terrible, has attracted widespread critical acclaim in the West and has won a number of major awards in Western film festivals. Together (2010), a quasi-official documentary about the 'making of' the feature film Love for Life and the everyday realities of living with HIV/AIDS in China, is something of an exception to Liang's earlier work, in that it was part-financed and sponsored by the Chinese Ministry of Health and heavily promoted as part of a Government publicity campaign against discrimination and stigmatisation of HIV-positive people. However, with Behemoth (2015), Liang appears to have returned to his trademark practice of ethically grounded independent documentary film-making, but on a more epic scale.

Dr. Marta HANSON (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore), Patrizia LIBERATI (Istituto di Cultura Italiana, Beijing) and Dr. Michael CLARK (King's College London)