Debut feature Jacky was one of the discoveries of the Rotterdam festival, where it was premiered. That critical success was then followed by selection for Un Certain Regard at Cannes and its directors, Brat Ljatifi and Fow Pyng Hu, are now in contention for Camera d'Or honours. Both Dutch citizens with a base in Amsterdam, Ljatifi and Hu each made a number of videos, short films, and documentaries before collaborating on Jacky. Two years ago, Ljatifi fashioned a script from everyday immigrant Chinese life, for which Hu played the title role himself. The pair subsequently edited the film together.

Weizhuo), who emigrated to Holland a long time ago with her husband to run a Chinese restaurant. Nowadays, she does little more than care for the garden, watch the days pass, and worry about the status of an unmarried son. Tradition requires that he marry a Chinese girl, so when a kind of mail-order bride arrives on the scene, Jacky has little alternative but to bow to custom.

"We like movies like [Taiwanese directors] Tsai Ming Liang's Vive L'Amour [1994] and Hou Hsiao Hsien's Goodbye South, Goodbye [1996]," confirmed Ljatifi and Hu in an interview. Apply the same minimal stylistic aesthetics of those films to Jacky, and you have a quiet, observant, searching story in which all the key characters ­ mother, son, wife, friend ­ derive their personality from traditional cultural attitudes and are affected by association with surroundings and the people they meet. Since their thoughts are often difficult to articulate and their actions sometimes contradictory, the dialogue in Jacky is painfully sparse. It's left to the camera ­ with strikingly composed images and minute attention to detail ­ to tell the rest of the story.

Ron Holloway