To live and die in Beijing.

Suicide draws a sharp line between the one who goes beyond and those who stay behind. The most painful thing to realize is that not only has the dead man become invisible to us, but we are no longer visible to him. When Qi Lei, a twenty-three-year-old performance artist, killed himself in Beijing in 1994, the living were left with unanswered questions, an unfinished story line, incomplete dialogue, and the cruelty of real or imagined guilt.

Suicide poses a particular challenge to cinema, weaving a subtle dialectic between the known and the unknown. To investigate the "reasons" - the motives, emotions, and thinking processes - behind the death involved, one has to become a bit of a smuggler, treading a line that, if crossed, promises no return (unless you're a fraud). It makes sense that a deception lies at the heart of Frozen, a courageous new film fictionalizing the real suicide of Qi Lei, and that the footage had to be smuggled out of China and edited in Holland. Maybe filmmakers and would-be suicides have something in common: they tell lies, wear masks. In this case, Wu Ming, the alias used by Frozen's director, means "No Name."

Let's go back. 1994, the year Qi Lei committed suicide, followed Tiananmen square by only half a decade. The blood had dried, but China's wounds hadn't healed - the idealism of an entire generation had been crushed. The new market economy provided some with the means to forget; others rejected the growing materialism but found themselves increasingly marginalized. That same year the Film Bureau (the government organization that regulates film production) prohibited seven film- and videomakers from creating any further work. "No Name" may have been among them. He heard about a young performance artist who had staged his own death according to the seasons: an earth burial in the fall, a water burial in winter, a fire burial in spring, and - the grand finale - an ice burial in the summer. Qi Lei had planned to die by hypothermia, but failed. A week later he was found dead in his bathroom (the film's ending is different). After interviewing the artist's friends and trying unsuccessfully to speak to his relatives, the director and his coscreenwriter realized that nobody understood what really happened, and that it was up to them to figure out "the story" behind this sad, seemingly pointless death. So they raised a bit of money, hired a few actors and nonprofessionals, and shot the film independently - which in China means illegally.

Frozen artfully displays the insolence of its mode of production. The lifestyle it describes doesn't go against the grain, but simply ignores it. Shot mainly in the maze of Beijing streets, courtyards, and tenements, where neon signs and skyscrapers coexist with quaint, pre-industrial scenes, the film explores an underground milieu of creative, ambitious, yet alienated young people stuck with their families in cramped apartments while the rest of society looks on their malaise with disdain. In this situation, you have no privacy. You witness your brother-in-law's sexual hang-ups and endure his vulgarity and greed, while you feel your sister's loneliness but are powerless to reach out to her. The only place you can be alone with your girlfriend is in the backseat of a cab at night, the driver shyly watching in his rearview mirror. The window of your airless bedroom opens onto an empty lot where kids play ball. Your best friends eat soap in public to demonstrate "revulsion"; others are arrested in the middle of their performances. You feel trapped, so you sit around drinking beer, idly chatting with your buddies, throwing darts in a smoky bar, or screaming out loud while listening to rock 'n' roll.

A work of fiction photographed like a documentary, Frozen respects what a friend calls Qi Lei's "complicated inner world." Directed with a keen eye for real-life detail, it contains moving performances in the roles of the protagonist, his sister, and his girlfriend, as well as moments of goofiness, dry humor, and poignancy. Frozen offers rare insight into the convulsions experienced by today's Chinese society and the plight of the post-Tiananmen generation. As a film and a document, it challenges viewers' expectations about contemporary China, as well as the strange, arrogant, and pitiful act we call suicide.

Berenice Reynaud is a United States correspondent for Cahiers du Cinema. She teaches at the California Institute of the Arts.