A showcase and reflection of a region’s rapid growth

Films from acknowledged masters collide and create a dialogue with those of lesser-known and emerging artists in the latest showcase of new Chinese cinema by the UCLA Film & Television Archive and CalArts.

Taking the geographically wider purview of pan-Chinese film -- augmenting mainland work of independent-minded rigor with Hong Kong and Taiwanese titles (including a tribute to recently deceased Taiwanese director Edward Yang) -- the series aims for a simultaneous artistic breadth and regional immediacy that reflects China’s ever-growing status as an engaged, if still controversial, economic power. Screenings will be at either the Billy Wilder Theater or downtown at REDCAT starting tonight and extending through Oct. 26.

A searching quality binds many of the offerings. Leading Sixth Generation filmmaker Jia Zhangke is represented by his stately and superb “Still Life” (tonight, UCLA), set amid the social displacement and demolition efforts of the monumental Three Gorges Dam project, and which likens its two protagonists’ unrelated efforts to find estranged loved ones to a communal rubble-sifting. Meanwhile, noted underground documentarian Wu Wenghuang’s rough-and-tumble look at those on the fringes of China’s expanding film industry -- saddled with a provocatively taunting if family-newspaper-unfriendly title (Thursday, REDCAT) -- is a portrait of ready exploitation, one that doesn’t spare the filmmaker’s own appropriative role as he follows a homeless man’s efforts to get extra work while shopping a script.

In director Ying Liang’s witty and rueful “The Other Half” (Oct. 13, REDCAT) pollution -- both industrial and emotional -- in a Sichuan town creates a litany of clients seeking compensation, but what exactly does young, pretty legal secretary Xiaofen (Zeng Xiaofei) want? Her cough to go away, her mother to stop pushing marriage-ready suitors on her, and her shiftless boyfriend to stay out of trouble, for sure. But then what? A study in the contrasts of progress and stagnancy through one disaffected woman (and many stunning long shots), this one’s an easy standout.

The subtitle of the series is “The Unofficial Stories of Tang Tang, Piggy, Little Moth and Others,” which has the air of something fable-ish but also urgent, as if to reinforce that whether fictional or not, the lives of everyday people dominate. Even if they’re the star of a genre piece. Piggy is the code name given a gung-ho rookie (Kate Tsui) in the fleet-of-foot, sharply edited thriller “Eye in the Sky” (Saturday, UCLA), the directorial debut of longtime Johnnie To collaborator Yau Nai-hoi. Central Hong Kong is depicted as a forbidding but manipulable maze that serves both a dedicated surveillance cop (Simon Lam) and his quarry: an elusive bank-robbing mastermind (Tony Leung). Who prevails is who can solve the ultimate urban trick of how to be aware yet stay anonymous.

In Peng Tao’s hurtling, disturbing street drama “Little Moth” -- arguably the brutal heart of the series (Oct. 20, UCLA) -- a couple believe they’ve solved their money problems when they buy an 11-year-old who can’t walk to pass off as their beggar daughter. Their naive introduction to illegal enterprise falls apart over pity, the emotion most inconvenient to any capitalistic notion.

Restless, and at the end, devastating, Peng’s movie combines Chinese filmmakers’ cherished preference for uninterrupted long takes with an up-close hand-held style that feels like Dardenne brothers-style social realism at its most unflinchingly powerful. You’d almost swear the film was cross-cut-edited more, but it’s just Peng’s mastery at holding together the antagonistic forces of his desperate tale of escape and abandonment within one nervous frame. And yet at the end, the camera rests on a solitary child’s impenetrable face, a casualty of determination that a rapidly changing China can ill afford to leave behind.