"All the cash had to be brought in by friends in suitcases." Joan Chen is describing the unusual financial arrangements she was obliged to make to shoot her film Xiu Xiu (in competition today) in remote, rural China. The film, she says, was extremely harsh physically. Every day, Chen and her crew had to drive for up to four hours across barely existent roads to reach their distant locations.

Chen, a childhood star in her native China, arrived in the US to study filmmaking way back in 1981. "I didn't have the guts," she says when asked why it has taken her so long to make her directorial debut. For most of the last decade, she has been acting in other people's films. "But I finally felt I had accumulated enough experience and knowledge to start making films myself. I knew that if I didn't start now, I never would."

Yes, she confirms, the story about how she was discovered by Dino De Laurentiis in a Hollywood car park is completely true. "His car pulled up just as I was leaving an audition. He asked me, did I know how Lana Turner was discovered!" At first, Chen admits, she was a little nervous. "I thought he was trying to hit on me or something." But sure enough, De Laurentiis offered her first big break in Hollywood.

Although Chen now lives in San Fancisco, she spent her formative years in China. "I feel most strongly still about Chinese topics." Xiu Xiu is set during the Cultural Revolution, an era during which her own family suffered heavily. "My grandfather committed suicide, we lost our house - we suffered just the same as everybody else."

Nevertheless, she is not traumatised by her memories. After many years in the US, she looks back on her childhood in China with nostalgia. "Even though there were many bad things that happened, that was my youth. At least, my generation had a belief. That belief may have been shattered, but that's the process of growing up." GM