Wang Xiaoshuai poses with the Silver Bear trophy during the 58th Berlin Film Festival.

A Chinese film about love, responsibility and infidelity won the Silver Bear award for best script at the 58th Berlin Film Festival on Saturday. Based on a true story, In Love We Trust (Zuo You), Wang Xiaoshuai's eighth film, tells the tale of a divorced couple who agree to bear another child in order to save their dying daughter.

"It may sound like a soap opera but I hope this film goes beyond boundaries," Wang said in an earlier interview with China Daily. "It deals with ordinary, middle class people in a way that could take place in any country."

For Wang, the film marks a change in generational focus from previous films like Beijing Bicycle, which had teenage boys and girls as its protagonists and won the Grand Jury Silver Bear Award at the 2001 Berlin Film Festival.

"It is a shift to middle age," the 41-year-old director said. "I wanted to show people already pressured by parenthood, responsibility and work, and how they cope when faced with a sudden disaster."

The film is set in Beijing, but the images are of a large, faceless contemporary Chinese city, where scores of grey, high-rise apartment blocks form a physical maze as complex and oppressive as the emotional one negotiated by the main characters.

"In China, and especially Beijing, everything is changing fast, growing and developing," Wang said. "Everything that was traditional can now only be found in history books."

Wang added, however, that human beings essentially stay the same. "I hope my film can leave people thinking and looking at their lives," he said.

The original Chinese title of the film is Zuo You or Left Right, a reference to the opposing pull of the characters' conflicting loyalties. Wang said that the international title, In Love We Trust, reflects the film's optimism.

"I hope that when people are confronted with disaster, they will use love and rationality to deal with it," he said.

In Love We Trust made its world premiere in Berlin where last year's top Golden Bear award was won by another Chinese film, Tuya's Marriage. Wang's films have enjoyed substantial success on the international film circuit.

As well as his Silver Bear award for Beijing Bicycle, Wang's Shanghai Dreams, about a family sent from Shanghai to work in the countryside during the 1960s, garnered a Special Jury Prize at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival.

By Chen Nan

Editor:Wang Nan