Minh Nguyen-Vo
Directing
Biography
Nguyễn Võ Nghiêm Minh (b. 1956), or Minh Nguyen-Vo, is a Vietnamese-American director and former physicist. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, in 1956, he grew up in a small Vietnamese town during the war. After emigrating to France, he studied aeronautical engineering at the University of Poitiers. He then moved to the USA where he took a doctorate in Physics at UCLA. For many years he researched the interaction between light and sound before returning to UCLA to study screenwriting and directing, which he completed in 1998. His directing debut Buffalo Boy (2004) screened at festivals including Toronto, Locarno and Busan and won numerous international awards.
Known For
Kim is 15; his father and step-mother have two buffalo, their lifeline as subsistence rice farmers. During the rainy season, there's no grass and the buffalo are starving. Kim volunteers to take the beasts inland to find food. On this coming-of-age journey, Kim sees men mistreat women, men fight with men, and French taxes rob the poor. He works for Lap, a buffalo herder whose past is entangled with Kim's parents, and he makes friends who will lead him to his place in the world.
Buffalo Boy
In a near future Vietnam where global warming and rising seawater levels have forced cultivation to be done on floating farms, a strong-willed woman has to make a critical decision about her ex-lover, a suspect of her husband's murder.
2030
In 1960s South Vietnam, an eight-year-old boy finds refuge in his family's cinema, drawing hope from the films he watches as he comes of age amid a divisive war.