To make her latest movie, Joan Chen is revisiting her past in more ways than one. In her grey blouse and plain old-fashioned trousers, Joan Chen could hardly look more different from the gorgeously dressed empress chewing opium poppies in Bertolucci's The Last Emperor.

After her commercial success of the early 1990s, Chen's acting offers dried up and she was forced to work with lower quality material. Her frustration at the situation was relieved when a writer friend, Yan Geling, came up with the short story Xiu Xiu the Sent Down Girl (Tian Yu) in 1998. When Chen read this tale of a girl sent from the city to the Tibetan steppes during the Cultural Revolution, she felt an urge to make it into a film.

"It was the material that gave me the desire and courage to go through with it." said Chen, who personally escaped the fate of the sent-down girl when she was selected for film work during her first year of high school.

"It was an inner urge to step up, instead of being dragged down by the bad offers that were no longer good for me. I created a new profession for myself."

The result of the adventurous filming in the Tibetan highlands is a lyrical movie about the loss of innocence and respect for humanity during the tumult of the revolution. Shot by the cinematographer Lu Yue (of Shanghai Triad and To Live), Xiu Xiu won prizes including the Golden Horse in Taiwan and a nomination for a Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. Not only that - when Richard Gere saw Xiuxiu he loved it so much he recommended Chen to be the director for his and Winona Ryder's romantic drama Autumn in New York the coming year.