and mercenary and seems to use historical British atrocities--perpetrated by the Younghusband Expedition of 1904, which sought Tibet as a gateway to Chinese trade--to deflect criticism of similar Chinese brutality toward its southern neighbor.

"We're aware of the film," said a spokesman for the International Campaign for Tibet, in Washington, D.C. "I'm not sure how much mileage the Chinese can get out of it, though, since they do depict the Tibetans as being very different from the Chinese, and that in itself defeats the point."

Vic Skolnick, who with his wife, Charlotte Sky, runs the Cinema Arts Centre, wondered whether "Red River Valley"--whose director, Fang Xiaoning, and actress, Ning Jing ("Red Firecracker, Green Firecracker"), will be at the screening--was really pro-China propaganda. "What do they say at the end?" he asked. "That people will always fight for their independence? What does that mean?"

If the piont of the three-day festival is providing a window into China--and what its people see and think--then "Red River Valley" is as valuable a film as any in the series.

"It's an opportunity," Skolnick said of the event, "an opportunity to see in one fell swoop films made over a five-decade span, and in which you can see the changes that have occurred there. And you can certainly see them."

The features include such art-circuit classics as 1959's "The Lin Family Shop" (tomorrow, 3:45 p.m.), one of the last films made with the relative freedom of pre-Cultural Revolution policies. The latter was directed by Xie Jin, whose latest, "The Opium War" (3:15 and 9:30 p.m. Saturday, 3:10 and 8 p.m. Sunday), will be a likely high-light of the festival--albeit one with its own political agenda, as it was made to commemorate last year's relinqishing of Hong Kong by the British.

The older films are more overtly socialistic. "It was Mao's thing, and Lenin's, too, that the way to get through to the masses was through their popular culture," Skilnick said. "And before the '80s you can see that a lot of the film out of China was very ideologically driven."

By the '80s, however, there's a shift to more personal films, films in which the family reflects the social changes and tensions that are affecting China as a whole. "Women are a huge theme, the way they have to fight things like bound feet, arranged marriages, child rape, which was all true," Skolnick said. "But they're also used to point up what's going to in China at large."

One of the strongest examples, he said, is "Woman Human Demon" (9:45 p.m. tomorrow; 5:15 p.m. Saturday), about a woman who defies tradition and plays one of the great mythic characters in Peking Opera (the cinematography as well as the acting is said to be outstanding).

Another is "The Sacrifice of Youth" (7:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday), which tells the now-familiar story of a young city woman's "re-education" in rural China during the Cultural Revolution. It's certainly a story familiar to Zhang Yimou: He, too, was sent to the countryside at age 17, an experience that has informed many of his films, "The Story of Qui Ju" included.

Set in contemporary times (unlike his Oscar-nominated "Ju Dou" and "Raise the Red Lantern"), "Qui Ju" is the tart story of a stubborn peasant woman (played Zhang's ex-paramour Gong Li) who pursues justice for her husband through the bureaucratic labyrinth of the Chinese court system. Screening Sunday at 5:30 and 9 p.m.--Zhang will address the 5:30 p.m. Sunday screening--it is funny as well as sadly satiric, and is a milestone in a career that has had more than a few.

The son of an officer in Chain Kai-shek's Kuomingtang army (one brother fled to Taiwan, the other was branded a spy), Zhang was at first rejected by the Beijing Film School when it reopened after the Cultural Revolution, largely for being too old (never mind that is was the government that had kept him in the sticks). There, his classmates included Chen Kaige ("Temptress Moon"), with whom he is often linked--not because of a similarity of style but because they are exemplars of China's so-called "Fifth Generation" of filmmakers 9the fifth class to attend the Beijing Film Academy and the first after it reopened).

Having worked first as a cinematographer 9on Kaige's "Yellow Earth," for example0, he has done as much as anyone to push Chinese cinema to the forefront of international consciousness, both with his unerring eye and his flair for political allegory.

There will be receptions (by reservation only) following several screenings in the series; "Red River Valley" tomorrow night at 7:45; "Boys and Girls (Teenagers)" Saturday at 7:15 p.m. (the director will be present) and following "Qui Ju" on Sunday at 5:30 p.m. For reservations, call 516-423-7610. For schedule information, 516-423-FILM.