Hong Kong-based sales agent Golden Network Asia has picked up worldwide rights excluding mainland China to two titles from Chinese producer Lola Zhang's Yunnan New Film Project - Wang Fen's The Case and Peach Blossom Land, to be directed by Huang Ruxiang.

Golden Network's Carrie Wong will be selling both projects at next week's American Film Market (AFM).

The Case, which is screening at the Tokyo International Film Festival this week, is a black comedy about a guesthouse owner with a shrewish wife whose life is turned upside down when he discovers a suitcase full of frozen body parts.

The film premiered at this year's Hong Kong International Film Festival and won the student audience award at the Shanghai film festival.

Peach Blossom Land, currently in development, is one of the 38 selected projects that took part in this week's Tokyo Project Gathering. The contemporary comedy follows two swindlers who try to con a group of naïve villagers by setting up a fake bank. Huang will direct from a script by Ismene Ting.

Both films are part of Zhang's Yunnan New Film Project - a slate of ten films by female directors from mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Backed by the government of Yunnan province, the project aims to develop a new kind of Chinese cinema which is contemporary and entertaining and provides an alternative to the big-budget epics that currently dominate the Chinese box office.

'Our line-up covers various genres - drama, comedy andthrillers - aimed at different types of audience but all told from the female point-of-view,' Zhang told Screendaily.

Other titles in the series include Yin Lichuan's The Park, which picked up the FIPRESCI prize at the Mannheim-Heidelberg film festival this week; Ismene Ting's Finding Shangri-La, starring Zhu Zhiying (Lust, Caution); Xiao Jiang's Pu'er Tea, and Li Hong's The Big And The Little.

The first two films to be completed in the series - The Case and The Park - are both receiving a domestic release in China later this month via China Film and Guangdong Film Company.