Japanese director Takeshi Kitano earned some of the highest praise of the festival for Kikujiro's Summer, a whimsical road movie about a working-class tough who takes a young boy on a journey to find the mother who abandoned him.

The tender portrayal of the rough man warming to the child marks a major change for the multi-talented Kitano, generally known for his violent, dark Yakuza dramas.

In this two-hour odyssey, Kitano's skills as stand-up comedian, TV personality, actor, writer, cartoonist, musician and painter all shine through. ``I'm profoundly Japanese,'' Kitano told mediapersons. ``There's a restraint in this film that is specifically Japanese. People don't show their emotions the way they do in American movies where there's so much laughter and tears.''

These characters hardly express emotion at all. Theeight-year-old Masao keeps his eyes averted virtually the whole time, and Kikujiro is a study in deadpan gruffness.

Kitano, winner of a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, said the film also satisfies Japanese appetites for burlesque and slapstick, with scenes where the hardened Kukijiro invents games and stunts to cheer up his desolate charge. Love Will Tear Us Apart, from Hong Kong's Lu Lik Wai, was a tougher sell -- a slow-moving, depressing portrait of loneliness and alienation in the lives of four mainland Chinese immigrants struggling to survive in the jungle of Hong Kong after the end of British rule.

Contrasting with these vastly different takes on contemporary Asia, Chinese director Chen Kaige, a previous winner at Cannes for Farewell My Concubine, weighed in with a sweeping, nearly three-hour-long epic recounting the unification of China in the third century BC.

The Emperor And The Assassin is an impressive achievement with plenty of visual drama and power, butreceived mixed reviews. Its length may discourage some viewers.

A slice of modern Chinese history informs The Emperor And The Assassin's portrayal of the past. One of Kaige's co-screenwriters penned the screenplay while imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution.

Kaige told mediapersons that the small character of the king's chancellor, who hangs himself rather than reveal the true paternity of the king, was based on his first-hand experience with betrayal. During the Cultural Revolution, Kaige said, he was forced to denounce his father -- and their relationship has never been the same.