Joan Chen has lived in San Francisco for more than 30 years — longer than her native Shanghai — but the Bay Area still holds many surprises for the actress and filmmaker. 

“I’ve lived here forever and never been to Fremont,” Chen said during a recent conversation with the Chronicle. “I discovered all these wonderful boba teahouses, Asian restaurants and Asian markets. It’s actually a very wonderful suburb.”

Fremont is also, suddenly, the center of the Bay Area filmmaking universe. Chen stars as a mother in “Dìdi,” a coming-of-age dramedy about a Taiwanese American boy, which opens the 67th San Francisco International Film Festival on Wednesday, April 24, at the Premiere and Marina theaters. An encore screening is scheduled for May 4 at the Roxie Theater.

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In addition, Chen is set to be honored with SFFilm’s tribute award on Sunday, April 28 — two days after her 63rd birthday — at the Premier Theater to honor her career as a triple threat: movie star (in both the United States and China), filmmaker and good luck charm for Asian American cinema.

While Chen could not attend opening night because of previously scheduled work commitments in China, she said she’ll be back in time for Sunday’s event, which features her in conversation with President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Janet Yang and a rare 35mm screening of her directorial debut, 1998’s Cultural Revolution-themed masterpiece “Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl.”

“Joan Chen is an icon and a maven and a jewel of the Bay Area,” said SFFilm Director of Programming Jessie Fairbanks. “We’re really elated to celebrate Joan, because she was doing things behind the camera as a writer, director and producer at a time when you did not see women of color holding those types of roles in Hollywood.”

Chen is best known for her starring role in Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1987 Oscar-winning epic “The Last Emperor” and as a member of the cast of David Lynch’s early 1990s TV series “Twin Peaks.” But she has had a long and varied career, from Vietnam War films (Oliver Stone’s “Heaven and Earth,” 1993) and action movies (1995’s “Judge Dredd” opposite Sylvester Stallone) to art house fare (Ang Lee’s “Lust/Caution,” 2007) and streaming series (Netflix’s 2016 “Marco Polo”, FX’s 2023 “A Murder at the End of the World”).

Her experience with Bertolucci first stoked her desire to direct. She became one of the first Asian women to helm a Hollywood movie, handpicked by star Richard Gere — a fan of “Xiu Xiu” — to direct “Autumn in New York” (2000), a romantic drama co-starring Winona Ryder. In 2020, she made a documentary, “The Iron Hammer,” about Chinese women’s Olympic volleyball star “Jenny” Lang Ping, and she has completed a Chinese-language feature film that is awaiting release.

She is also a supporter of young Asian American artists and their independent projects, cutting her fee to star in indie films such as San Francisco director Alice Wu’s 2004 “Saving Face” (now an LGBTQ classic), UC Berkeley alum Quentin Lee’s 2012 “White Frog” and Alan Yang’s 2020 Netflix film “Tigertail.”

“Dìdi,” which won the Sundance Film Festival’s U.S. dramatic audience and special jury ensemble awards and is scheduled for a July release, particularly resonated with her. In real life, Chen has spent the past few years switching between being a mother in San Francisco and a daughter in Shanghai.

Her mother became ill with cancer and died in late 2022. Chen still travels back often for work — she has had a career resurgence and a whole new generation of fans in China — and to spend time with her father, with whom she has grown closer.

At the same time, her daughters with husband Peter Hui, a San Francisco cardiologist, grew into adults and are now in their 20s. Angela Hui, a Harvard graduate, is a writer; Audrey, an NYU student, is an actress. Chen said she identified with Chungsing, her character in “Dìdi,” a stand-in for the mother of writer-director Sean Wang, who was raised in Fremont. 

“I had a difficult time raising children in America,” Chen admitted. “I didn’t know what’s right, what’s wrong, what to say, what not to say. It was a great learning experience. Really, (my daughters) taught me how to be a mother. They are two beautiful, beautiful, talented children.”

Chen’s own childhood was far different. She said she feels a bit of guilt in that she had a mostly happy upbringing despite growing up during the Cultural Revolution. The girl in “Xiu Xiu,” a victim of that dark period in Chinese history, is the life Chen might have been destined for. Instead, she became a teenage actress by luck after she was discovered on the rifle range near her high school.

“I was a pretty good shot,” Chen said. “I had a focus problem, so if I had to shoot 100 bullets consecutively, then I lost a little focus.”

Focusing on acting was a different matter. She broke through as a star in the late 1970s and soon went to Hollywood, and in the process got married and raised children. Although she visited her parents regularly, the past few years deepened her relationship with them.

Before her mother died, they had long conversations about their family history, reliving stories of not only Chen’s parents, but her grandparents. Her grandfather committed suicide because, Chen says, he was wrongly prosecuted during the Cultural Revolution and “he had too much pride.”

Chen began to write the stories down, turning them into a column for a literary magazine in China. The columns now form the basis of a family memoir, to be published later this year in Chinese.

“I feel like I know my parents’ generation,” Chen said. “Everything they’ve gone through. Also, I delved into my grandparents’ past, and did a lot of research in the library — newspapers, magazines — so it’s basically a contemporary Chinese history, told from a personal point of view.”

Reach G. Allen Johnson: ajohnson@sfchronicle.com