Tran Anh Hung

Trần Anh Hùng (English: Anh Hung Tran), born December 23, 1962) is a Vietnamese-born French filmmaker.

Early life and education
Hung was born in Da Nang, South Vietnam. Following the fall of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, he immigrated to France at age 12.

Hung majored in philosophy at a university in France. By chance, he saw Robert Bresson's film A Man Escaped and decided to study film instead. He went on to study photography at the National School Supérieure Louis-Lumière, which trains cinematographers and supported himself by working in the Musée d'Orsay bookshop.

Film career
Hung has been at the forefront of a wave of acclaimed overseas Vietnamese cinema over the past two decades. His films have received international fame and acclaim, and his first three features were varied meditations on life in his home country of Vietnam.

Hung's Oscar-nominated debut (for Best foreign film) was The Scent of Green Papaya (1993), which also won two top prizes at the Cannes Film Festival. His follow-up Cyclo (1995, which featured Hong Kong movie star Tony Leung Chiu-Wai), won the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival. The Vertical Ray of the Sun, released in 2000, was the third film in his "Vietnam trilogy."

After a sabbatical, Hung returned with the noir psychological thriller I Come with the Rain (2009), which featured a star-studded international cast including Josh Hartnett and Elias Koteas.

Hung directed Norwegian Wood, an adaptation of Haruki Murakami's novel of the same name, which was released in Japan in December 2010.

Films on Vietnam
In France, Hung studied at the prestigious film school, Louis Lumière. For his graduation project in 1987 he wrote and directed a short film La femme mariée de Nam Xuong, inspired by an old Vietnamese folk tale (Truyền kỳ mạn lục).

Following this Hung made another short film, La pierre de l'attente (1989), before launching the feature film The Scent of Green Papaya (1993). The Scent of Green Papaya was acclaimed for its style and its beautiful images of Vietnamese life. To date, the film is the only representative of Vietnamese cinema to be nominated for Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

The success of Papaya helped Hung gain funding for the next film, Cyclo. The film tells stories of poor people living in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), and was filmed on location there. Cyclo won the Golden Lion at 52nd Venice International Film Festival, and at the age of 33, Hung was one of the youngest filmmakers to be thus honored there.

Having depicted life in Ho Chi Minh City, Hung turned his attention to Hanoi in The Vertical Ray of the Sun (2000). The main characters of the film are three sisters who idolize their parents' family life, before the truth is revealed after the mother's death.

Influences and style of film-making
Hung's films are made to rebuild the image of Vietnam that he lost when immigrating to France, and to provide the audience with another point of view on Vietnam when this topic has been long dominated by French and American cinema. The stories are based on Hung's knowledge about Vietnamese culture and (in the second and third films) his first-hand experience gained from trips to the country.

Hung is strongly influenced by French cinema and from some European and Japanese filmmakers, namely Bergman, Bresson, Kurosawa, Tarkovsky and Ozu.

Hung's style of filmmaking is expressed through the claim: "Art is the truth wearing a mask". He denies the conventional story-telling style and pursues making films with a new language: "to challenge the audiences' feelings, making them enjoy the films not with the critical reasoning but the language of the body".

As a banner of Vietnamese films, Hung, a French-Vietnamese director, shattered the stereotypical images of poverty and backwardness depicted in prior American and French films with his unique camera images, showing the audience a Vietnam where tenderness and cruelty coexist. In Vietnam, Hung's most famous "trilogy"—The Scent of Green Papaya (1993), Cyclo (1995), and The Vertical Ray of the Sun (2000)—expresses feelings for his country.