Soon after Bernardo Bertolucci wrapped location filming of The Last Emperor, members of the Peoples' Liberation Army swapped their roles as movie extras for real life. What had been celebrated as a sign of Premier Deng Xiao Ping's openness in welcoming European film-makers was coldly exposed as the empty public relations gesture history has proved it to be: in the face of world opposition, soldiers at Tiananmen Square dealt the emerging civil rights movement a blow from which it hasn't yet recovered. Since then, documentaries like The Dying Rooms have recounted China's abuse of many unwanted children, particularly girls, and the culture has remained more or less closed.

Now, The Soong Sisters (Sunday, March 8th, Screen, 2.30 p.m.) offers a chance to understand the inner workings of official efforts to reposition tribal ties to build a new loyalty to state and nation. Shot on location in China after its producers had submitted to months-long script approval and granting of permissions by the authorities, this is the first film offered such facilities since Bertolucci's tale of emperorturned-citizen Pu-Yi.

But then, the film is Hong Kong-produced and the fact that is was made may indicate a desire by the Chinese Government to reassure us that freedom of speech will continue to exist there. The story of these three sisters trawls through 20th-century history, starting with the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty in 1912, lingering on the survival of dynastic ties despite the official break-up of the traditional family unit, and summoning a cast of characters which includes pro-western leaders like Chiang Kai-Shek. Born to a pro-western family, the sisters operated that age-old strategy of making marriage a career move, with Ching-ling wedding Dr Sun Yat-Sen, leader after the 1912 rebellion; Mei-ling marrying General Chiang Kai-Shek and Ai-ling living long enough to become the richest woman in China.

The Soong women are hardly Howard Hawks-style wise-cracking dames - publicity bumf explains how one loved money, one loved power and one loved China. Ching-ling is still referred to as "the Mother of modern China"; Mei-ling remains a figure almost totally excised from history. But their story is a rare, valuable chance to wonder yet again how so vast a country can remain so puzzling to western minds. The showing of The Soong Sisters is part of Dublin Film Festival's special celebrations for International Women's Day on March 8th. While this is not a dedicated mini-programme, there is a quirky, potentially interesting series of narratives in this year's festival, exploring different aspects of female experience. David Leland's The Land Girls (Sunday, March 8th, Ambassador, 5.50 p.m.), based on Angela Hunt's novel, also premieres on March 8th, and features former Brookside star Anna Friel along with Catherine McCormack (soon to be seen in Pat O'Connor's version of Brian Friel's Dancing At Lughnasa) and Rachel Weisz as three young women working in the English countryside during the second World War.

Hunt's novel was a best-seller, if considerably less of a literary achievement than Pat Barker's Ghost Road trilogy about the first World War, so we might expect more charm than bite from what publicists call Leland's "beautiful valentine" to the many girls who worked the land, received no pension and then returned to the kitchen to become 1950s women, breeding 1960s feminists.

Nonetheless, Leland's first script was Personal Services, the tale of Madame Cynthia's suburban sex games, so at least the movie should promise more than an easy, sentimental meandering through giggling girlish love affairs.

IF YOU MUST have bite, three other movies look like good bets. Eve's Bayou (Friday, March 6th, Ambassador, 8.15 p.m.) marks the debut of Kasi Lemmons, featuring a rarely chosen point of view - that of a 10year-old girl just out of infancy but not yet squashed by the strict gender requirements of 1960s rural Louisiana. "The summer I killed my father," Eve tells us in the opening shots. "I was 10 years old." Lemmons develops this unbeatable line into a parable of family power struggles, influenced, it seems, by the pathfinding writing of Toni Morrison as much as by Garden of Eden stories which recount the loss of innocence. Eve's curiosity, her attempt to make sense of adult relationships, starts as a way of finding her own place in the world but triggers a blight of perception and understanding which may risk her own maturity. This could be a major movie. The Girl With Brains In her Feet (Thursday, March 5th, Screen, 6 p.m.) shifts point of view to early adolescence, this time through 13-year-old Jack, a brilliant young athlete whose talent seems set to free her from the dull lives of her prettier schoolpals, as well as from the darker threats lurking before her as a mixed-race child. But what Jack really, really wants is to shed her virginity and in this gentle tale, director Roberto Baguro lets her show her fascination with sexuality, without compromising her innate gutsiness.

This 1990s-style Gregory's Girl - this time featuring a female protagonist - was written by Jo Hodge. A longer shot, but one worth taking, is Lili Taylor's script of Girls Town (Thursday, March 10th, Screen, 6 p.m.), directed by Jim McKay. As always, Taylor stands as the icon of plain girls with heroines' hearts, here playing teenage mother Patti, whose story of self-definition asks what happens when adulthood comes too soon. Expect no sentiment and be rewarded with new work by a fine actor whose face guarantees she will never challenge Demi Moore in the box-office stakes. Just like most of us.