Tony Bui
Biography
Biography
Airlifted to safety with his father's family in the waning days of the South Vietnamese government, Tony Bui did not return to his homeland until he was 19, and his immediate reaction was to flee. "I'd never experienced heat like that in my life. And the humidity! There was no air conditioning." Yet, unbeknownst to him, he was embracing his birth country, and within an hour of landing in America, he wanted to go back. So began the filmmaker's love affair with Vietnam, which would see him return once or twice a year thereafter, for weeks or months at a time, to gain greater fluency in Vietnamese and try to understand why "all the things I hated--the heat, the dust, the noise, the motorcycles--became things I needed." His mother's family had stayed behind, and his uncle Don Duong, one of the country's best known actors, was in a highly advantageous position to help Bui hurdle the obstacles he would encounter filming in Vietnam. After shooting his thesis short "Yellow Lotus" (1995, starring Duong) there, he attended the 1996 Sundance Filmmakers and Screenwriters Lab, where he developed his "Three Seasons" (1999) screenplay, captivating Jason Kliot and Joana Vicente of the New York production company Open City Films. Undaunted by his insistence on shooting entirely in Vietnam, they came aboard and persuaded October Films to finance the project and Harvey Keitel to play the sole American role.
The result was a sweeping, handsomely photographed portrait of a country in transition, so well crafted that it became the first film to win both the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award (not to mention Lisa Rinzler's outstanding work pulling down honors for Best Cinematography) at the Sundance Film Festival. Despite the constant presence of government censors and the implied threat that things might not go so well for Duong and other family members if Bui and his producer brother Timothy (who also co-wrote the story) somehow deviated from the approved script, the director delivered a film which, when shown as a courtesy to Vietnamese authorities, moved them to stand up and congratulate him on its positive vision of their country. Though he did not set out to heal history, "Three Seasons" provides a different awareness of a country that has put the war behind it and moved on (unlike an America still smarting from defeat), and in that difference lies a step toward redemption. Viewing the conflict in the context of a thousand years of trying to declare their land, including wars with The Khmer Rouge and Chinese following America's withdrawal, the Vietnamese, having normalized relations with the United States, are once again integrating Americans into their nation's fabric en route to becoming an international country.
Bui succeeded in making something universal while capturing a uniquely Vietnamese sensibility and poetic expressiveness that might be deemed overly sentimental if seen exclusively through Western eyes. Using the motif of the changing weather cycles (the dry season, the wet season, and the growth season), he constructed three corresponding stories originally intended to play one after another (as if a whole year had passed) but found his movie in the editing room when he interweaved their parallel arcs to run simultaneously. The tale of the cyclo driver (Duong) who falls in love with a prostitute has the tones and textures of the dry season. A street kid loses his case and wanders the street to find it amidst a wet season backdrop of grays and blacks, and a woman hired to pick lotus flowers inspires her reclusive master (a poet wasting away with leprosy) to write again, becoming his amanuensis, in the segment synonymous with the growth season. Keitel's world-weary Vietnam veteran in search of his child, though often mentioned as a fourth story, is really part of the other three. Bui served notice that he is a director to watch with a visually stunning film, often recalling an impressionistic painting, especially in the sun-drenched shots of a lake of white lotuses emerging out of the morning mists. "Three Seasons" provided a long overdue chance for American audiences to acquaint themselves with the new Vietnam.
Filmography
Director (Feature Film)
Writer (Feature Film)
Producer (Feature Film)
Life Events
1975
Airlifted out of Vietnam at the age of two; endured the refugee camp experience (three months in Fort Chafee, Arkansas) before relocating with his family to Northern California where they settled in the Silicon Valley community of Sunnyvale
1992
Returned to Vietnam for the first time to visit his maternal grandparents
1995
Directed student short "Yellow Lotus", filmed in Vietnam and starring his uncle Don Duong, one of the country's most-esteemed actors; film was shown on the festival circuit (including at Sundance) and won several awards
1999
Feature debut as writer-director "Three Seasons"; also produced; executive produced by and starring Harvey Keitel; first American feature to be filmed in Vietnam since the war; selected as Vietnam's entry for the 1999 Best Foreign-Language Film Academy Award
2001
Co-produced brother Timothy's debut feature "Green Dragon"; screened at Sundance
Family
