Vietnamese director Minh to receive Kim DJ Nobel Peace Film Award

Dang Nhat Minh of Vietnam will receive the third Kim Dae-jung Nobel Peace Film Award, the Gwangju International Film Festival Organizing Committee said.

Launched in 2011, the annual award is given in cooperation with the Kim Dae-jung Peace Center to encourage filmmakers to 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 Vietnam War.

Born in 1938 in Hue, a small Vietnamese village, he began making documentary films in 1965 and became the first Vietnamese to win the Nikkei Asia Prize for Culture in 1999.

Minh, who served as general secretary of the Vietnam Cinema Association, was awarded the Vietnamese government’s Ho Chi Minh Award in 2007 for his cinematographic works.

He formed a connection with Gwangju in 2005. His films “When the Tenth Month Comes” (1995) and “Nostalgia for the Countryside” (1984) were screened at the Gwangju film festival and received warmly by Korean audiences.

One of his latest works, “Do Not Burn” (2009), based on a diary kept by Dang Thuy Tram, a young female medical doctor who served at a field hospital of the Vietnam National Liberation Front, won the audience prize at the 19th annual Fukuoka Film Festival in 2009.

The Kim Dae-jung Nobel Peace Film Award will be presented by Lee Hee-ho, chairwoman of the Kim Dae-jung Peace Center, during the opening ceremony of the Gwangju film festival on Aug. 29 at Gwangju Bitgoeul Citizen Culture Center. The festival will run until Sept. 2.

By Chun Sung-woo (swchun@heraldcorp.com)