Jia's student film from the Beijing Film Academy won the top prize at the Hong Kong Independent Short Film Awards, impressing with a hybrid aesthetic both naturalistic, in its gentle eye for those on the lower rungs of China's vast urban migration, and experimental, in its buzzing found-sound soundtrack and word/image combinations. Wang Hongwei (the bedraggled star of Xiao Wu) is a soon-to-be-unemployed cook in Beijing; he's anxious to head home to his rural village for Chinese New Year, but unfortunately none of his old friends-now construction workers, prostitutes, scalpers, and students-want to return with him. Rarely screened anywhere (this is the Bay Area premiere), Xiao Shan Going Home is a revelation.