FEER: Tony Bui and Three Seasons

[Dam Thanh Son <son@ctp.mit.edu>]

Far Eastern Economic Review

Film - Vietnamese-American director Tony Bui returned to his roots in
Saigon and found many surprises, including the seeds of what would
eventually blossom into his award-winning film, Three Seasons. Bui
describes how he developed the ideas for the stories in this lyrical,
bittersweet movie, and how he dealt with the strict controls the
Vietnamese authorities imposed when he was shooting the movie--the first
American film to be made in Vietnam since the fall of Saigon. 


LOCAL HERO

A return home garners many surprises--and an award-winning film for
Vietnamese-American director Tony Bui
                                   
By Scarlet Cheng in Los Angeles
Issue cover-dated August 19, 1999
                                   
Earlier this year, a film by a 26-year-old Vietnamese-American, Tony Bui,
took the independent film world by storm. His feature, Three Seasons, won
the top award, the Grand Jury Prize, at the Sundance Film Festival in Park
City, Utah. It was a surprising choice. Sundance is known for its tough,
edgy tastes, but Bui's film is a lyrical, if bittersweet, look at modern
Vietnamese life, told through four stories that have the romanticized
quality of fables. Also surprising was the fact that the film received the
audience award as well--thus, it won over both critics and audiences. 

Certainly, Three Seasons gives us a completely fresh take on a country so
tragically riven by war: It portrays a society in which individuals search
not only for economic survival, but also for love, connections, and grace.
For them the war is a faint, diminishing echo, heard far more loudly by
Americans than Vietnamese. "The entire country is about moving forward and
progressing," Bui says, "and I think they're more at peace with the past
conflict than we are, we Americans. We still have a lot of guilt about it,
a lot of frustrations." 

Born in Vietnam, Bui went to the United States with his family when he was
two. Growing up in Sunnyvale, California, he was encouraged by his mother
to go back to his native land. His first visit was not a success: He was
19 and couldn't stand it--the heat, the congestion, the pollution. But
then he went back again, and again, and began to discover his roots. As a
student studying film at Loyola Marymount University, Bui's sojourns in
Vietnam were eked out on a shoestring budget. He stayed in private homes
and spent a lot of time "hanging around on the streets," talking with
cyclo (trishaw) drivers and watching poor people trying to make ends meet.
He also began to form the ideas that would eventually become his films. 

In 1995 he completed a short film called Yellow Lotus, starring his uncle
Don Duong, a well-known actor in Vietnam who also features in his current
film. Bui calls Yellow Lotus "an earlier incarnation of Three Seasons--a
peasant comes to the city, a man trying to find his place amid this
change." The earlier film was shown at the Telluride and Sundance Film
Festivals and won several awards. In 1996 he was accepted into Sundance's
Writer's and Director's Labs, and the result was the script for Three
Seasons. Its $2 million production cost was funded by Good Machine, a New
York production company that has backed some of Taiwanese director Ang
Lee's films. 

The film's title comes from the idea that south Vietnam, where the film
was shot, has two seasons, the dry and the wet. For Bui, the third season
is the one of growth-- "the season of hope, the season of life and poetry
and music." Each story within the film is set in a different season: The
story of the cyclo driver is set in the hot, dry season and is full of the
warmth of yellows and oranges; the little boy vendor is set in the wet
season of blues and greys; and the growth season is the backdrop for the
story of Teacher Dao and the young woman who becomes his temporary
confidante. The story of James Hager, the ex-GI, takes place across the
time-frame of the others.