On the road for Scene by Scene

(CNN) -- I'm on the highest point of Pyongyang, and I've just done something shamefully cynical.

To ingratiate myself with my North Korean hosts, I've bowed deeply and laid flowers before the giant bronze statue of their "Great Leader" Kim Il Sung, still officially the country's president, 13 years after his death.

As I turn to walk away, I hear a strange cry -- "whoosh, whoosh!" My eyes pick out someone in military fatigues emerging from behind a nearby shrub and waving frantically at the statue.

It takes me a few seconds to realize what's happening. This man's full-time job is to shoo away the birds so they don't do what birds are apt to do -- relieve themselves on the prized monument to the man whose son still wields absolute power in the most isolated and regimented society on earth.

I'm the one who feels covered in ordure, figuratively speaking. So why my act of gross obsequiousness?

It's all for you, dear viewer, just another day on our six month quest to meet the men and women who make the movies that entertain four billion people across 71 countries of the Asia Pacific.

It's day three in North Korea, and I'm desperate. The "Dear Leader" and self-styled "Genius of the Cinema" Kim Jong Il has produced the first North Korean film for international release. It's called "A Schoolgirl's Diary" and had its global premiere at the Hamburg Film Festival in late September.

We've come via China on an aging Soviet-built Tupolev airliner to meet the film's director, Jang In Hak. We know nothing about him, other than the fact that he's 57 and has directed several of the "Dear Leader's" films.

But our attempts to make contact through our North Korean minders have come to nought. Hence my prostrate posture before the statue of the "Dear Leader's" father.

I've made sure my hosts are watching, but maybe my insincerity is more transparent than I imagine. Three monumentally frustrating days later, we're back on another Soviet-era plane leaving Pyongyang without having met Jang In Hak.

He's a "common person," the minders have explained gravely, and common people can't be interviewed. The state-owned Korea Film Studios won't even give me a photograph of him. The world's only faceless filmmaker. Such is the plight of the creative force behind the celluloid fantasies of a tyrant.

We've been painting on an extraordinary canvas, a vast slab of the world stretching from the shores of the Bosphorus on the very edge of Europe to the islands of the South Pacific. From "Turkey to Tonga," I tell our interviewees.

Our brief is to meet the filmmakers of the Asia Pacific, but which ones? Whittling it all down to the 47 minutes of airtime that constitute a CNN hour has been perhaps the greatest challenge.

Some things are obvious. Hong Kong director John Woo -- best known to Western audiences for "Mission Impossible 2" -- is in the wilds of China filming the biggest and most expensive Asian movie ever made.

Not surprisingly for a man grappling with a four-hour epic (two parts for Asian audiences, one for the West) and a budget "south of $70 million," Woo says no to an interview six times.

But we're not deterred. Remember Deep Throat's advice in "All the President's Men"? "Follow the money."

So several weeks later, we're in the Beijing office of the head of the China Film Group, the main financier of Woo's "The Battle of Red Cliff."

"Wanna go out to the set?" "Sure."

Within the hour, we're belting along the freeway south of the Chinese capital. And in another four, we're filming over John Woo's shoulder on the set of a medieval Han dynasty fort, and he's cordially introducing us to his international cast.

Then it's onto one of his purpose-built Chinese battleships on an adjacent lake. There are several of them at $1 million apiece. But I find myself thinking more about John Woo's electricity bill, for giant spotlights on the surrounding hills have the power to turn night into day.

Back in Beijing, it's another Chinese director who makes perhaps the biggest impression on us of the entire mission. Chen Kaige shot to international fame by winning the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1993 for "Farewell My Concubine," a film that introduced many Westerners to Asian cinema for the first time.

Right now, Chen is with cast and crew at the China Film Studios shooting a lavish tribute to the legendary Chinese opera star, Mei Lanfang.

But his own life is a story of triumph and tragedy worthy of any of his characters on screen. During the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, Chen denounced his own father to the authorities and had him sent to the countryside. The boy Chen was just 14.

Reflecting back 40 years later, he observes ruefully that fear can be a stronger emotion than love, whatever the ties that bind. Desperate to please the rampaging Red Guards, Chen branded his father, also a filmmaker, one of the hated "capitalist roaders" Mao Zedong had determined needed to be purged and humiliated. He's never forgiven himself.

Now, Chen wants to do a film on the Cultural Revolution. But the Chinese Government still won't allow anything to tarnish Mao's memory, and the subject is strictly off limits.

In our interview, Chen goes where no other Chinese filmmaker dares go, calling on the authorities to allow more freedom so that important national milestones like the Cultural Revolution can be canvassed.

"We need to learn from the mistakes of the past so they aren't repeated," he says.

With the all important Olympics looming, I'm startled when Chen ventures the opinion that for all their burgeoning wealth, the Chinese people are spiritually poorer than they used to be.

"Where are the old values of integrity and care for others?" he asks. "Something has been lost along the way."

For all the region's big-name directors with equally big budgets, many others are forced to tailor their films within the strictest of limits.

Take Indonesia's foremost director, Garin Nugroho, whose latest feature "Opera Jawa" has been nominated for an inaugural Asia Pacific Screen Award. In spite of a long record of box-office and artistic success, Nugroho was obliged to shoot the entire feature in two weeks, cast and crew working nonstop from dawn till 11 o'clock at night.

The result is visually stunning, and certainly a lesson for Hollywood that sumptuous outcomes can still be had for relatively modest outlays.

And then there are the filmmakers who put their lives on the line for their art as well as their wallets.

In Cairo, we meet the director and screenwriter Wahid Hamed, who's been under sentence of death from Islamic militants since 1994 for what they allege is the blasphemous and obscene content of his films.

Hamed can go nowhere without a bodyguard and gun. His "The Yacoubian Building," a screen adaptation of a famous Arabic novel directed by his son, Marwan, has become the biggest-grossing Egyptian movie of all time. But he's further enraged extremist opinion by depicting a corrupt imam along with the first homosexual scene ever portrayed in Arabic cinema.

A highlight of our Egyptian shoot was a lengthy interview with the screen legend Omar Sharif, best known to Western audiences for "Lawrence of Arabia" and "Doctor Zhivago."

After some light-hearted banter about how he still wows the ladies at the age of 75 (strangely enough the secret is walking and eating less), the veteran actor congratulates the Egyptian authorities for standing firm against demands by more than 100 MPs for "The Yacoubian Building" to be cut.

Omar Sharif describes Islamic fundamentalism as a grave and dangerous threat to free expression in the Arab world. But with characteristic wit, he goes on the offensive against free expression of a musical variety, begging piano players the world over to stop launching into Lara's Theme from "Doctor Zhivago" whenever he enters the room. It's his least favorite tune.

Because of her anchoring commitments for CNN in Hong Kong, our presenter Anjali Rao was only able to be with us on the road in India and Bhutan.

To an outsider, it came as something of a shock that many of Bollywood's biggest stars detest the term, with its connotations of a poor version of Hollywood in downtown Bombay.

Shilpa Shetty of "Big Brother" fame had the best line: "It's like calling French cinema Follywood," she joked.

We also learned about the changing nature of Hindi cinema, the emergence of a strong middle class prompting studios to break the Bollywood mold by having fewer song and dance numbers and, in some cases, none at all.

Among these are "Chak De! India" (Go for it, India), the latest blockbuster starring the country's biggest male heartthrob, Shah Rukh Khan. With only a title track to its name, "Chak De!" is about the efforts of India's national women's hockey coach (SRK, of course) to forge a fractious group of competing regional players into an assault against Australia for hockey's World Cup. No prizes as to who wins.

The studio that made it, Yash Raj, took a risk that the audience wouldn't mind the absence of song and dance so long as it got a stirring patriotic tale on the 60th anniversary of India's independence. It's a risk that's paid off handsomely at the box office with the biggest revenue debut of any Shah Rukh Khan film. So the bean counters have now joined SRK's legion of female fans in swooning at his feet.

And so we end where we begin, that is, where we opened Scene by Scene with Anjali Rao on the "roof of the world" in the mystical Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan. Beneath her is the Indian subcontinent, behind her central Asia stretching up to the Russian Federation, to her right Arabia and the Middle East up to Turkey, to her left, Asia stretching down through Australasia to the Pacific Islands.

It was a magical moment -- a mountain stream, a Buddhist monastery, cloud-capped mountains -- truly a place to contemplate the vast reach of the Asia Pacific.

We were privileged to meet the Bhutanese director Khentsye Norbu, the third incarnation of a Buddhist lama, who stunned the film world with his debut feature "The Cup" and repeated that success with "Travellers and Magicians."

When Norbu made "The Cup" in 1999, Bhutan had no film industry at all. Now he's inspired a generation of young filmmakers to follow him, and Bhutan is producing an average of two features a month.

It's all thanks to the digital revolution, the advent of inexpensive video cameras and projectors opening up vistas that young film-makers could only dream of less than a decade ago, and giving this tiny kingdom of 700,000 people a homegrown industry for the first time.

And that's the magic of Asia Pacific cinema. Even the smallest of small-time directors in the smallest of countries now have the means to tell their own stories and reflect their own cultures to their fellow citizens and the world at large.

As Chen Kaige put it, "The charm of cinema is that you can help people to understand themselves." And with more Asia Pacific films gaining a wider audience around the world, you can extend that understanding to others. E-mail to a friend

Scene by Scene's interviewer and scriptwriter, Graham Davis, was part of the production team that scoured one third of the earth's surface in search of the men and women who make half the world's films. Some of these films will find their way to the Asia Pacific Screen Awards, a collaboration with CNN, UNESCO and FIAPF (International Federation of Film Producers Associations) to acclaim films that best reflect their cultural origins and cinematic excellence.