The film is the story of Xiu Xiu, a teen-ager who, like some 7 million other "educated youth" in China, was sent down from the cities to the countryside to learn from the peasantry during the Cultural Revolution. She instead suffers from the brutality of men with power.
The English-subtitled film won best picture at Taiwan's Golden Horse Awards and best dramatic feature at last year's Fort Lauderdale Film Festival. It begins nationwide release this month.
Chen never received permission from Chinese authorities to shoot. After the film debuted at last year's Berlin Film Festival, Beijing banned Chen from working in China for one year and ordered her to pay a fine of 10 percent of the movie's $1 million budget.
This is a dramatic turnabout for the 38-year-old Chen, known as Hollywood's exotic Chinese paramour - from a romp as Anne Heche's sexy plaything in the poorly received "Wild Side" to the spoiled, opium-addicted empress in the Oscar-winning "The Last Emperor."
"I didn't even know that was typecasting," Chen said recently from Vancouver, British Columbia, where she had been filming a cable TV movie. "I just thought that's what American people wanted. I accepted things as being strange."
The Shanghai-born actress was tapped for stardom by no less than Jiang Qing, wife of Mao Tse-tung, who needed a gun-savvy girl to play a guerrilla in a propaganda movie about the Communists' Long March. She chose Chen, who was on her high school's rifle team.
Expectations soared as she studied acting at the Shanghai Film Studio. At 15, she was called "the young Elizabeth Taylor of China." At 19, she won the nation's top acting prize for playing a revolutionary's daughter in pre-Mao China in "Little Flower." Chen left China for the United States in 1981 to study filmmaking at California State Universi-ty, Northridge, and also to escape her celebrity back home.
Things were slow until she was seen walking across a parking lot by director Dino De Laurentiis, who cast her in the lead Asian role in his 1985 TV movie "Tai-Pan." Roles in good and bad projects followed.
"Going through that bad experience affirmed my love of film and filmmaking," Chen said. "I wanted to demand more from myself and wanted to widen my horizons for my career. That's how this film was made."
