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Chen Weijun won't win any prestigious prizes for the TV shows he produces for the local TV station in the central Chinese city of Wuhan. His reports on patriotic celebrations and official history lessons are the standard, sanitized fare characteristic of China's government programming. But that's just his day job. The filming Chen really cares about — what he calls "the most important thing I've done in my life" — he does surreptitiously in his spare time.

Chen is one of China's few independent documentary filmmakers — and to get honest footage in a country that often treats truth as a state secret, the 33-year-old cameraman relies as much on stealth as stagecraft. For his 2002 documentary, To Live is Better Than To Die, a stark portrayal of a family destroyed by AIDS, he sneaked into the village of Wenlou in central Henan province dressed as a peasant, creeping through cornfields in the dead of night with his equipment stashed in a fertilizer bag. That was the only way he could elude police in order to film the effects of one of the mainland's biggest health scandals: the transmission of HIV to hundreds of thousands of poor farmers who sold their blood to illegal blood merchants with dirty equipment. Even so, he was caught and run out of town four times.

Unsurprisingly, To Live is Better Than To Die is the kind of film that makes the Chinese authorities squirm. It follows the physical, mental and social disintegration of the Ma family, in which both parents and two of three children contracted HIV. In one scene, the Mas' infant son crawls beneath the splintered wheelbarrow where his AIDS-stricken mother lies dying, her moans of pain mingling with his gurgling attempts at language. Such unexpected images are jarring in a country where censors aim never to show China's ugly side. Yet, even though "underground" films are banned on the mainland, they are being made. The state media is even unwittingly contributing to the growth of maverick documentaries. In recent years, unofficial Chinese films have been made about vagrant children, migrant workers, homosexuals and corrupt village officials. Many were produced by frustrated filmmakers like Chen, using technical savvy acquired while working for mainland media outlets, sometimes even with equipment borrowed from the state.

Jiang Yue and Duan Jinchuan, two Beijing filmmakers who worked for China Central Television (CCTV) before starting their own production company, are examples of the breed. They pay their bills by making programs for state television under contract, while satisfying their artistic yearnings with self-financed projects. In February the BBC aired two of their films as part of a series entitled New China, New Year. Jiang and Duan's films will also show at this month's Hong Kong International Film Festival. While making The Secret of My Success, a hilariously honest account of a corrupt village election and a winner of the Silver Wolf award at the Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival, Duan kept a CCTV decal stuck on the front of his camera. "It opens doors," he explains.

For many filmmakers this double life isn't hard to pull off. The country's censors don't pay much attention to films showing in the documentary genre at foreign festivals. Inside China, audiences for documentaries are virtually nil. (The only venues for documentaries are the state-run TV stations least likely to run them.) Still, the lack of domestic acclaim frustrates many filmmakers. Says Jacob Wong, who selects documentaries for Hong Kong's International Film Festival: "Most of these independent filmmakers make just one or two films and then give up."

For Chen, though, the ordeal of making To Live is Better Than To Die paid off. He fell into the project while shooting a health show for Wuhan TV, when he met a doctor caring for AIDS victims. On the doctor's recommendation, Chen visited the Ma home in 2001. But before he had finished filming, police arrived and hauled Chen and other reporters down to the station, where they were held for nearly 24 hours. Chen gave his tiny digital video tapes to another reporter, who smuggled them out in hotel soapboxes she had in her purse.

From the moment he had those tapes back in his hands, Chen says he felt determined to document the crisis in Wenlou. "The more trouble they gave me," he recalls, "the more I knew I couldn't let the project drop." Obstinacy has its rewards. In February, the documentary was screened at the U.S. Sundance Film Festival, where Chen received standing ovations and purchase offers from HBO. Despite the accolades, Chen fears the film may cost him his job. Just before he left town to attend the festival, he says he received a phone call from a local official telling him "that taking the film to Sundance was like stripping my own mother naked and selling tickets for people to ogle her." Still, he has no regrets: "The satisfaction of having told the truth makes the trouble worthwhile," he says. But for now, he'll be careful to keep that satisfaction to himself.

• Susan Jakes / Wuhan
• China's documentary filmmakers reveal the uncensored — and "unpatriotic" — truth