Biography

Minh Nguyen-Vo -- Writer/Director


I grew up in a small town in southern Vietnam during the war. A U.S. airbase on the outskirts of town drew numerous and frequent attacks from the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army. To escape the violence, I spent a lot of my boyhood inside the only movie theater in town.

Besides being a coping mechanism for the war, cinema was the portal allowing me to escape the violence for other parts of the world, even if only for a few hours at a time.

Except during periods of heavy fighting, I was able to watch at least one film every week. I watched everything from John Wayne westerns to Kurosawa’s “Rashomon.” Interestingly enough, all of the films from the West were dubbed in French. I grew up thinking John Wayne was French and was surprised to learn years later that he wasn’t.

I have to think all of the great films I saw in that one-room cinema subconsciously influenced me in my scientific and artistic careers.

I eventually emigrated to France to study and eventually to the United States, where I earned a doctorate in physics at UCLA. I became fascinated with the interaction between sound and light and that became my main research subject for several years. My passion to follow these ideas from different perspectives returned me to cinema or perhaps cinema came back to me.

In the late 1990s, I studied screenwriting and directing in the UCLA extension program.

Besides, “Buffalo Boy,” I have two short films selected for four international film festivals in Europe and the United States.

“Places and Times” is a travel log I shot during location scouting in Vietnam for “Buffalo Boy.” The scouting took place near the city of Vung Tao, where I grew up.

“Crimson Wings” was my first short film and inspired by the short story “Butterfly Dream” by Chuang Tzu.

About “Buffalo Boy”

“Buffalo Boy” is my first feature film. The story’s point of view is through a young boy and his relationship with the father through the cycles of life and death.

The film ends with the decline of a way of life marked by a desperate native hyper-masculinity under French colonialism in the late 1940s.

Water acts as a powerful metaphor and a stunning visual device in “Buffalo Boy.” Water matches the mercurial pace of a young man’s inner turmoil and turns his fight for freedom into an oblique reference to the Vietnam’s historical backdrop.

The ebb and flow of events that rule his life bears the same destructive yet regenerating force as the water -- family ties and affections are flooded, then swept away in a potent call for adulthood and kept secret at the bottom of a shallow marsh.

“Buffalo Boy” is inspired from by a collection of classic short stories in “Scent of the Cá-Mau Forest” by Son Nam, a renowned Vietnamese writer.

The screenplay was selected for development in the IFP/Los Angeles Screenwriters Lab 2000 and the Paris-based éQuinoxe Association. My script also participated in IFP/New York market, Cinemart and the Pusan Promotional Project.

The project is a French, Belgian and Vietnamese co-production with financial participation from the United States, Australia, Canada and Germany.

Besides being Vietnam’s entry in the 2006 Academy Awards, “Buffalo Boy” has competed at some of the most prestigious film festivals and won these awards: The film also participated in other films festivals in Toronto, Pusan, Namur, Bangkok, Rotterdam, Singapore, Sydney, Sarajevo and Istanbul. The film has been released in France, South Korea, Australia, Holland and the United States including the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2005 to critical acclaim and audience attendance.

Minh Nguyen-Vo filmography:

 

For more information visit http://www.angelsgateart.org/buffaloboy/index.html
or for interview opportunities with Minh Nguyen-Vo, contact:
 

Nathan Birnbaum or Marshall Astor

Angels Gate Cultural Center

3601 S. Gaffey St.

San Pedro, Calif. 90731

310.519.0936|| www.angelsgateart.org || info@angelsgateart.org