Vietnamese movie maker wins S Korean peace prize
Veteran: Director Dang Nhat Minh was given the Kim Dae-jung Nobel Peace Film Award in South Korea. — File Photo
HA NOI (VNS)— Vietnamese veteran movie director Dang Nhat Minh last Thursday has been granted the Kim Dae-jung Nobel Peace Film Award at the Gwangju International Film Festival in South Korea.
The 75-year-old film-maker received the award from the chairwoman of the Kim Dae-jung Peace Centre, Lee Hee-ho, who is also the widow of the late president and 2000 Nobel winner Kim Dae-jung.
Launched in 2011, the award aims to encourage film makers who deal with human rights, peace, freedom and the value of nature.
Minh has gained an international reputation as a director well versed in expressing social contradictions from the perspective of the poor or underprivileged through films on the American War.
Born in 1938 in Hue, he began making documentary films in 1965. His 1984 feature movie Bao Gio Cho Den Thang Muoi (When the Tenth Month Comes) is the first post-war Vietnamese movie to be shown at international film festivals and was named one of the 18 best Asian films by the US Cable News Network (CNN) in 2008.
The movie, together with another of his cinematographic works, Thuong Nho Dong Que (Nostalgia for the Countryside, 1995), were screened at the Gwangju Film Festival and received warmly by Korean audiences.
One of his latest works, Dung Dot (Don’t Burn, 2009), based on a diary written by liberation army doctor Dang Thuy Tram during the most violent period of the war from 1968 to 1970, won the audience prize at the 19th annual Fukuoka Film Festival in 2009.
The movie was also Viet Nam’s entry into the Academy Awards’ Foreign Language Film category in the same year.
Thanks to his great contribution to Vietnamese cinema, Minh was awarded the Ho Chi Minh Award by the Government in 2007. — VNS