Perhaps movie buffs think they know just about every film featuring the elegant Chinese superstar Gong Li, but here's one even they might have missed.

It's "A Soul Haunted by Painting," in which she stars as Pan Yu Liang, a prostitute's maid in the 1930s who became a notorious painter specializing in nude portraits.

Her work was so controversial that she was forced to flee China for Paris.

That 1994 film, directed by Huang Shuqin, is one of some 30 from mainland China that will be unspooling through March 3 in the third Celebration of Chinese Cinema.

The fest is the brainchild of New Yorker David Buckley, who saw his first Chinese movie during a visit to Beijing in 1995.

It so impressed him that he founded a company, China Century Entertainment, to bring flicks to the United States from Beijing.

Out of that grew the festival, held annually to coincide with the Chinese New Year.

"I was really impressed by the movies I saw in China," Buckley remembers. "They reminded me of the French New Wave. They had the same kind of feel."

Other entries includes: Feng Xiaogang's "A Sigh"(2000), about a love triangle; Li Xin's "Gun with Love"(1997), set during the civil war in 1930s China; Yao Shougang's "Raftsman"(1991), about a young woman who flees after she's seized as a concubine; and Peng Xiaolian's "Once Upon A Time in Shanghai"(1998), which tracks two lovers caught in political turmoil in 1948 Shanghai.