Members of the audience at a special screening of highly-praised Vietnamese film Dung dot (Don’t burn) in Berlin, Germany on August 22, will have a chance to talk with the director-People’s Artist Dang Nhat Minh, reports VietnamPlus.
Dung dot director to meet Berlin audience
Poster film Dung Dot Members of the audience at a special screening of highly-praised Vietnamese film Dung dot (Don’t burn) in Berlin, Germany on August 22, will have a chance to talk with the director-People’s Artist Dang Nhat Minh, reports VietnamPlus.
The film was produced in 2008, based on the diary of Dang Thuy Tram, a young female doctor based in a Quang Ngai Province battlefield who bravely saved lives before U.S. troops took hers at the age of 27.
“Fred, don’t burn this one....It has fire in it already”, the Vietnamese interpreter of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam told U.S. military intelligence specialist Fred Whitehurst who defied orders to keep the diary and held on to it for 35 years because he couldn’t find Tram’s family.
In 2005 through Whitehurst’s colleague photographer Ted Engelmann, who was also in the U.S. Army in Vietnam, they found Tram’s mother Doan Ngoc Tram.
After being officially published in 2005, the diary quickly became a bestseller. In less than a year, the volume sold more than 300,000 copies and comparisons were drawn between Tram’s writing and that of Anne Frank.
In 2008, the film won the Audience Awards at the Fukuoka International Film Festival in Japan. In 2009, Dung dot won three prizes at the 16th Vietnam Film Festival, including the best picture award – the Golden Lotus, the Best Scriptwriter Award and the Journalists’ Choice Award.
After many years of absence, director Minh came back to the film studio to make the movie and its success threw him back into the spotlight.
Minh, born in 1938, has directed Co gai tren song (The girl on the river), Thuong nho dong que (Nostalgia for the countryside), Mua oi (Guava season) and especially Bao gio cho den thang muoi (When the tenth month comes).
Minh used to serve as General Secretary of the Vietnam Movie Association and was honored with the title the people’s artist. In 2007, the local government granted him with the Ho Chi Minh prize for his contribution to the movie industry.