Trần Anh Hùng — Director | Biography, Movies & Career

Biography

Trần Anh Hùng (born December 23, 1962; Đà Nẵng) is a French filmmaker of Vietnamese ancestry.

Hùng was born in Mỹ Tho, South Vietnam. Following the fall of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, he immigrated to France at age 12. He 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 Louis Lumiere Academy, which trains cinematographers.

Hùng 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 Vietnam. Hùng'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, Hùng 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. Hùng directed Norwegian Wood, an adaptation of Haruki Murakami's novel of the same name, which released in Japan in December 2010. After Eternity in 2016, his return in a French production, The The Pot-au-Feu, is announced in February 2022, with Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel in the cast.