Putting the director in the frame

"While carefully looking and listening, Berry tried to catch and tell the accent in Jia's answers: (Are the accents) of China or of Shanxi's Fenyang? It seems that what Berry cares about more is the accent of individuals, art, film and style. It's Jia's accent or voice," Dai writes.

Berry is particularly interested in Jia's films, because "among filmmakers of his generation, he is one of the most intellectual", he says.

For him, Jia's work "is able to combine powerful images with challenging ideas-and that is something we don't see in the work of many of other filmmakers. In that sense, he is a true cinematic poet", Berry adds.

Although Jia's films address the reality of contemporary China, they are also about the human condition in universal ways, he says.

Another reason is that "Jia is always reinventing himself" and continually "searching for new ways of storytelling and new avenues of cinematic expression".