Charming with cinema

August's international breakthrough came with Pelle the Conqueror, which won him his first Palme d'Or in 1988, and both an Oscar and a Golden Globe, the following year.

After receiving his second Palme d'Or in 1992 for The Best Intentions, written by Ingmar Bergman, August directed a string of big productions, including The House of the Spirits, Smilla's Sense of Snow, Return to Sender and Night Train to Lisbon.

His fascination with the silver screen started early.

"When I was a child, there was no television," he says, adding that back then, once a year, children from schools went to a cinema to watch a film, which was usually a Hollywood Western. One time, a cinema mistakenly screened Italian master Federico Fellini's La Strada, which won an Oscar in the foreign language category in 1957, and watching that film changed August's life.

Now a master himself, August has shifted part of his focus to China in recent years. In 2008, he was a jury member at the Shanghai International Film Festival and presided over the jury panel at the Beijing International Film Festival last year.

"I've always been fascinated by Chinese culture and I read a lot of Chinese novels and books," he says.

During the Shanghai festival, August was approached by Chinese producer Sun Peng and The Chinese Widow was made. Starring Chinese actress, Liu Yifei, and American actor, Emile Hirsch, The Chinese Widow is about a US pilot forced to land in eastern China in the early 1940s, who is rescued by a beautiful young woman, played by Liu, and their subsequent romance.