Tran Anh Hung

After a sabbatical, Hùng returned with the noir psychological thriller I Come with the Rain (2009), which featured a star-studded international cast including Josh Hartnett and Elias Koteas.

It was announced in July 2008 that Hùng would direct an adaptation of Haruki Murakami's novel Norwegian Wood. The film was released in Japan in December 2010.

Having depicted life in Ho Chi Minh City, Hùng turned his attention to Hanoi in The Vertical Ray of the Sun (2000). The main characters of the film are three sisters who idolize their parents' family life, before the truth is revealed after the mother's death.

Hùng's Oscar-nominated debut (for Best foreign film) was The Scent of Green Papaya (1993), which also won two top prizes at the Cannes Film Festival. His follow-up Cyclo (1995, which featured top Hong Kong movie star Tony Leung Chiu-Wai), won the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival. The Vertical Ray of the Sun, released in 2000, was the third film in his "Vietnam trilogy."

As a banner of Vietnamese films, Anh Hung Tran, a French-Vietnamese director, broke the image of poverty and backwardness in the past American and French films with his unique camera images, showing the audience a Vietnam where tenderness and cruelty coexist. In Vietnam, Hùng's most famous "trilogy" - The Scent of Green Papaya (1993), Cyclo (1995), and The Vertical Ray of the Sun (2000) - expresses feelings for the motherland.

Following this Hùng made another short film, Hòn vọng phu (1989), before launching the feature film The Scent of Green Papaya (1993). The Scent of Green Papaya was acclaimed for its style and its beautiful images of Vietnamese life. To date, the film is the only representative of Vietnamese cinema to be nominated for Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

In France, Hùng studied at the prestigious film school Louis Lumière College. For his graduation project in 1987 he wrote and directed a short film Người thiếu phụ Nam Xương, inspired by an old Vietnamese folk tale (Truyền kỳ mạn lục).

Hùng was born in Mỹ Tho, South Vietnam. Following the fall of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, he immigrated to France at age 12.

Trần Anh Hùng (born December 23, 1962) is a Vietnamese-born French film director.

The success of Papaya helped Hùng gain funding for the next film, Cyclo. The film tells stories of poor people living in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), and was filmed on location there. Cyclo won the Golden Lion at 52nd Venice International Film Festival, and at the age of 33, Hùng was one of the youngest filmmakers to be thus honored there.