Trần Văn Thủy

Trần Văn Thủy is an acclaimed Vietnamese documentary film director. He has directed more than twenty documentary films on a wide variety of themes.

His work has often been a center of controversy in Vietnam; his 1982 film Hanoi In Whose Eyes, and his 1985 film The Story of Kindness, were both banned for a number of years by the Vietnamese government because each had content that was implicitly critical of the regime. Nonetheless, due in large measure to the success of his work at international film festivals, Thủy was able to continue working for the Government Cinema department as a creator of greatly significant films, including A Story From the Corner of the Park (1996), and The Sound of a Violin at Mỹ Lai (1999).

Trần Văn Thủy was born in 1940 in Nam Định, Vietnam. His father was Trần Văn Vỵ (1902–1975), an automotive mechanic and functionary in the French protectorate government who was personally supportive of the revolutionary Việt Minh. His mother was Đỗ Thị Hiếu (1917–2015). He was the second of seven children. In 1949, his elder brother Vĩnh was killed by French fire in the course of a sweep operation in Hải Hậu, a rural district in Nam Định Province where the family had taken refuge. Thủy as a result became the eldest son in the family. During his childhood he became an avid swimmer, a skill that later on was to prove of supreme importance to his survival during his years as a combat photographer. He was educated in French schools until 1954, when he turned fourteen. According to Тhủy, his father Tràn Văn Vỵ was an extremely humane man who made many efforts to help people in trouble, and Thủy attributes his own strong sense of social responsibility, and his activities as a philanthropist, to the influence of his father. After 1954 his family had a difficult time because Thủy’s father had worked for the French. None of Thủy’s brothers and sisters were allowed to enter colleges, in spite of achieving high scores in entrance examinations.

After high school Thủy enrolled in a museum course in anthropology organized by the Ministry of Culture, and in 1960 went out to the mountains in the extreme northwest of Vietnam to make ethnographic studies of small groups of minority peoples such as the Tổng lượng and Khu Sung. In 1965, he made his way back, partly on foot, to Hanoi, in order to study at the Cinema Academy, a subsidiary of the government Cinema Department. His training was supposed to consist of a two-year curriculum concluding in 1967, but after only one year, he and number of fellow students were recruited to go south as combat journalists and photographers.

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