French-Vietnamese film director Trần Anh Hùng was born on this day in 1962 in Da Nang, Vietnam. He moved to France at the age of 12, and later attended university as a philosophy major. However, after seeing the movie A Man Escaped by Robert Bresson, Hùng changed his studies to film and photography.
He started creating short films in college, and went on to make some of the most strikingly gorgeous and ruminative films of our time, like The Vertical Ray of the Sun and The Scent of Green Papaya. Trần Anh Hùng has a special way of commanding full attention from willing audiences with intimate stories of unassuming characters, a focused perspective, and a minimalist natural beauty in his films.
Some of his other most notable films include Cyclo and Norwegian Wood, which is based on the Haruki Murakami novel of love and loss.
Here is the trailer for Norwegian Wood (2011).
