| 23:19′ 22/03/2009 (GMT+7) | ||
|
VietNamNet Bridge – Nguyen Dieu Quyen, a Vietnamese American woman living in California was selected as “Person of the Year” by the US state’s local government. Dieu Quyen was born in Vietnam in 1978 and left the US at the age of 14. Beginning a new life in a strange country, she tried her best and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Mathematics and Teaching from the University of Long Beach. Currently, she teaches at the Pacifica High School in the city of Garden Grove in California. For the past several few years, Nguyen Dieu Quyen has been recognized as a good teacher and an active woman in social activities. She is also a member of the management board of representatives of Vietnamese language centers for the overseas Vietnamese community in Southern California. In addition, Dieu Quyen also works as a newsreader for the local television station. And she regularly acts as a MC for social events that are organized by the overseas Vietnamese community in California, contributing to the development and good of the community, especially as regards charitable activities. “Dieu Quyen is really an enthusiastic humanitarian activist. She has devoted all her heart, her soul, her timetable and her talent for the community. She is worthy of receiving the “Person of the Year” honor”, stated Jose Solorio a representative for California’s 69 County, which includes the cities of Anaheim, Garden Grove and Santa Ana. Dieu Quyen has awarded the honor in a ceremony on March 16th at California’s house of representatives. VietNamNet/CPV |
The Vietnam War: everything you know is wrong (Part One)
February 12, 2009
41 comments 
Photo credit: Eddie Adams (AP)
(This is the first of a multi-part series debunking liberal media myths about the Vietnam War.)
The Photo That Lost the War?
It’s one of the most famous images of the 20th century. Eddie Adams’ Pulitzer Prize winning 1968 photograph of an execution on a Vietnam street has been reprinted and reenacted countless times. In the film Stardust Memories, Woody Allen’s depressed character decorates his kitchen with a colossal mural of the image, to illustrate his angst. A post-modern artist recreated the iconic image in Lego.
However, few know the true story behind the photograph, which some cultural critics claim, then and now, “helped America lose the war.”
While lecturing on college campuses to promote his book Stalking the Vietnam Myth, author H. Bruce Franklin discovered that most students “were convinced the original photo depicted a North Vietnamese or communist officer executing a South Vietnamese civilian prisoner.”
However, the executioner was the chief of the South Vietnamese Police — an American ally. The victim was a captured Vietcong insurgent whose comrades in arms had themselves been summarily executing anyone associated with the South Vietnamese and the Americans.
After killing the captured prisoner, the police chief told journalists, “Many Americans have been killed these last few days and many of my best Vietnamese friends. Now do you understand? Buddha will understand.”
The photograph helped make Eddie Adams famous, but he wished he’d never taken it. Due to its notoriety, the photo ruined the police chief’s life, turning him into an internationally hated (and misunderstood) villain for all time. Adams never forgave himself.
As Eddie Adams once wrote in Time magazine,
“The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths. What the photograph didn’t say was, ‘What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American soldiers?'”
The Girl In The Picture
An equally infamous photograph snapped during the Vietnam War depicts a little girl running, naked and terrified, from her bombed out village, her clothing burned from her body in the blast.
Most people believe her village was attacked by Americans. It was not.
In fact, the village was accidentally bombed by the Vietnamese Air Force, who were nearby targeting communist North Vietnamese fortifications. In other words, this was an “all-Vietnamese” fight. Even the photographer was Vietnamese. No Americans were involved.
Adding to the confusion: in 1996, a Methodist minister publicly approached Kim Phuc, the “girl in the picture” and asked her forgiveness for ordering the strike. The trouble is: this man had nothing to do with the bombing. He was a lowly soldier stationed miles away.
Whie such stories of reconciliation are undeniably moving, Kim’s public “forgiveness” of this confused man, “must be viewed with the realization that while she is free to insinuate anything she pleases about the countries which give her refuge and support, she cannot freely criticize the Communist government of her former homeland. Although a political refugee in Canada, her relatives still live in Viet Nam.”
The minister’s motives are less clear or noble, but seem to be a blend of self-loathing and self-promotion.
These and other phony tales of American “atrocities” mar the image of the United States at home and abroad. Since the Vietnam War is constantly held up by the anti-war Left as an example of a failed, “racist,” “imperialist” conflict which only ended thanks to the “peaceful” protests of “courageous” hippies, getting the facts right is tremendously important.
Stay tuned for the next installments in this series.
Banh mi = Vietnamese soul food
February 12, 2009
Southern California is home to the largest Vietnamese population outside of Vietnam. And that means we are very privileged to be able to eat at some of the best Vietnamese restaurants in the USA.
One of my favorite simple pleasures is a banh mi sandwich. What is a banh mi, you say?
First and foremost is the Vietnamese style baguette. Crispy on the outside and light on the inside. You can order a choice of meats, from roasted or BBQ pork, chicken, pate, sardines or even vegetarian.
The finishing and most crucial addition is the topping of pickled carrots and daikon, fresh cilantro and sliced jalapenos. Sometimes cucumbers slices are added. This gives the sandwich a balance of savory, sour, hot and sweet.
And the best part about a banh mi? The average price is about $2.50. With this economy you cannot beat that! My favorite banh mi shop is part of a chain called Lee’s Sandwiches, and is located in Alhambra. leesandwiches.com/2008/index.php
I have decided that in 2009 I am going to find and sample banh mi all over the area. The website Battle of the Banh Mi has a directory battleofthebanhmi.com/finding-banh-mi/banh-mi-directory/#more-13 of Vietnamese banh mi shops all over the United States, and a few international shops as well. I may have to take this quest on the road.
Vietnamese culture preserved in the US
February 12, 2009
<!–
–>
 |
Nguyen Mai, a former Saigon\HCMC music professor, has helped preserve and popularise Vietnamese culture in the US, with her 36 brass string-zither.
Before 1975, Nguyen Mai taught traditional music and how to play traditional musical instruments, including the 36 brass string-zither in Ho Chi Chi City (previously known as Saigon).
After 1975, she re-settled in the US where she no longer gave music classes.
However, after moving to Orange County in California, US where thousands of Vietnamese lived, she was invited to teach the traditional music of Vietnam for the Vietnamese community there.
One of Mai’s friends brought her a brass string zither from Vietnam, and she started teaching Vietnamese traditional music right in her own garage.
Mai and Nguyen Chau, another musical professor, founded the Lac Hong music group in 1989, with the goal of offering more lectures on the different traditional instruments of Vietnam.
With only 10 students at first, Lac Hong now has more than 100 trainees in different classes, including a chorus singing class for children, a chorus class for adults and a traditional dancing class.
And class and rehearsals are now conducted on the second floor of a small shop in Little Saigon in Orange County, California.
On Saturdays, the rehearsal room is filled with melodious sounds from the traditional Vietnamese two chord guitar, the monochord and the 16-chord zither.
Mai confided to the Los Angeles Times newspaper that through being a music teacher, she has found that all the Vietnamese have love a for their traditional music. That has given her more determination to preserve Vietnamese traditional music in the US.
To date, Lac Hong is the biggest group in the US which is performing traditional Vietnamese music and arts.
Currently, two teachers are in charge of teaching folk singing to children from 4 years old upward, and every student is allowed to study at least one musical instrument.
And many of the students continue their study of the traditional Vietnamese musical instruments offered by Lac Hong even after they start their university studies.
Students do not only learn how to play traditional Vietnaese musical instruments, they also, step by step, learn about its culture.
Source: TT&VH
Translated by Mai Huong
Clive Owen has bank troubles in The International, but the people in Owl and the Sparrow tell us more about the world.
February 12, 2009
We have seen the future in Clive Owen’s face, and that future is bleak. The now-46-year-old English actor starred in one of the best films of 2006 (or of any year), Alfonso Cuarón’s dystopian Children of Men, where his job was to safeguard the future of humanity. The present is likewise grim for Owen’s categorically violent characters in Frank Miller’s Sin City, Spike Lee’s Inside Man, the Driver series, and Will Graham’s British crime pic I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, as well as in Jack Manfred’s sour Croupier, Owen’s breakthrough role. It’s difficult to imagine him in a romantic comedy.
Directed by Tom Tykwer. With Clive Owen, Naomi Watts, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Ulrich Thomsen, and Brian F. O’Byrne. Opens Friday.
Owl and the Sparrow
Written and directed by Stephane Gauger. With Pham Thi Han, Cat Ly, and Le Thu Lu. Opens Friday.
It has to do with his physical presence. The strength and resolve of Owen’s typical characters show through, but they always take a back seat to his essential bone-weariness. His is not a “hang-dog” expression, it’s “hang it all.” Owen’s big-screen masculinity is of the scruffy, anti-James-Bondian variety, which is why, with all due respect to Daniel Craig, Clive Owen should be the current James Bond for these post-martini times, disillusioned and case-hardened and in need of some sleep he’s never going to get. Punctuate it with a cigarette and a two-day beard, and we’ve got the basic Owen protagonist.
The International begins with a medium close-up of Owen standing outside the Berlin central train station, looking like a drowned rat. It grows nastier by leaps and bounds for Louis Salinger (Owen) as the increasingly familiar story unfolds. If only director Tom Tykwer (Run, Lola, Run; Heaven; Perfume) and writer Eric Singer had cooked up something a bit fresher than the old “malevolent clandestine superpower bent on taking over the world” scenario, à la Syriana, Traffic, or Goldfinger.
The laconic Salinger is an Interpol agent investigating major corporate skullduggery. IBBC, aka the International Bank of Business and Commerce, appears to be involved with assassinations, arms trading, intelligence gathering, destabilizing governments, and ultra-violent cover-ups of same from its fortress-like stronghold in Luxembourg, where sinister men in suits glower over computer screens and dispatch killers all over the globe. This bank has more armed goons than ATMs — don’t even think about complaining about a service charge.
There’s no Ernst Stavro Blofeld behind IBBC, just a pasty-faced, shaven-headed CEO named Skarssen (Danish actor Ulrich Thomsen). Skarssen eschews fluffy white kittens — he lives quietly with his family. His Hitler-Youth kids help him make his cold-blooded decisions. Among his witticisms: “The true value of a conflict is the debt it produces.” ICCB is evidently modeled on BCCI, a similarly naughty real-life leviathan bank of the ’80s and ’90s — but verisimilitude alone cannot save this film.
The MacGuffin of the piece, the “Vulcan Guidance System,” has to do with an Italian family of arms manufacturers named Calvini, which gives the producers the chance to shoot spiffy second-unit stuff in Milan — also in Istanbul, the environs of Berlin, and New York City — while Salinger and his adversaries tussle over the dingus. And of course there’s an indecipherable old man, played by veteran I.O.M. Armin Mueller-Stahl, who holds all the secrets in his head. Just to round things out and provide The International with the whisper of a potential love interest, a New York assistant DA (huh?) named Eleanor Whitman (Naomi Watts) pops up from time to time in various bits of business. But she’s strictly an afterthought.
As previously demonstrated, Owen can take a punch. The movie’s centerpiece, really the only reason to sit through it, occurs when Salinger goes into the Guggenheim Museum in New York on the trail of “Sherwood” (Brian F. O’Byrne), ICCB’s number one assassin. All of a sudden, a small army of hit men open fire on the Interpol man and his NYPD pal (Jack McGee) and turn the majestic Guggenheim atrium, with its curved 20th-century-modern ramp, into a Wild West shooting gallery. It’s the most spectacular “destruction” of a New York cultural landmark since Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly, and Jules Munshin made their bones with a dinosaur at the American Museum of Natural History in On the Town. (Tykwer’s bullet storm was reportedly shot on a specially built set in Germany to stand in for the Guggenheim.)
One wonders how a filmmaker like the talented Tykwer, who has delved deeply into philosophical drama in such films as Heaven, The Princess and the Warrior, and Winter Sleepers — not to mention the techno-fueled destiny-mobile Run, Lola, Run — got saddled with a meat-and-potatoes screenplay so atypical of him. Take away the Guggenheim shootout and we’ve at least got Clive Owen at half throttle. Take away Owen and there’s nothing left but the tired old mystic cabal of sadistic sorcerers. Maybe the US government could send bailout money to this movie. Put me down for a dime.
Things aren’t nearly so frantic in Vietnam, scene of filmmaker Stephane Gauger’s charming little fable, Owl and the Sparrow — although cash and the lack of it once again drive the plot. But where the money trail in The International leads to clichés, the low-key exploits of a little girl named Thuy are arguably as unpredictable as a thunderstorm in the South China Sea.
Ten-year-old orphan Thuy — played with a beguiling mixture of toughness and vulnerability by first-timer Pham Thi Han — runs away from the factory where her “uncle” exploits her and other child laborers, and heads for nearby Saigon (aka Ho Chi Minh City, although no one there bothers with that name), where she joins the multitude of homeless kids selling flowers and trinkets on the street. Running parallel to her story are the lonely lives of Lan, a pretty flight attendant living in an HCMC hotel (Cat Ly) and Hai (Le The Lu), a gentle young man tending the animals at the city zoo. Fate intends these three to come together, and director Gauger sees to it with a light, wistful touch plus a maximum of Vietnamese local color.
Films from and/or about Vietnam on American screens are rare as phoenix tails. American-made Owl and the Sparrow, exec-produced by Timothy Linh Bui (Three Seasons) and Ham Tran (Journey from the Fall), takes full advantage of director Gauger’s Viet-American point of view (half Vietnamese, Gauger was born in Saigon) and his apparent dedication to telling true-to-life stories of ordinary Vietnamese. Owl and the Sparrow opens Friday at the Sundance Kabuki as part of the San Francisco Film Society’s “SFFS Screen” series. It’s worth the trip across the bay.
Teen lands first film role with Eastwood
January 20, 2009
One of Bee Vang’s friends said to him, “You started all the way at the top. Where do you go from here?”
If only all actors had such problems.
Without a lick of acting experience — he was plucked from a crowd of hundreds of boys screen testing for the part — the 17-year-old Bee landed a plum role in Clint Eastwood’s “Gran Torino.” Eastwood, who starred in and directed the film, was determined to use authentic actors for this multicultural tale of a cranky old man living in a Detroit suburb that has shifted to a predominantly Hmong-American demographic. The famed Oscar winner picked a slate of fresh faces for the film.
if(typeof(miyahoo) == “undefined” || miyahoo.ads[mi_live_or_preview].dart.enabled){
document.write(‘<scr’ + ‘ipt type=”text/javascript” src=”http://ad.doubleclick.net/adj/mi.frs00/Entertainment/Movies;dcove=d;pl=story;lvl6=DonaldMunro;ac=Columnist;loc=ats;pos=MREC01;’ + dart_reg + dart_segs + dart_tk + kw_str + ‘sz=300×250;tile=4;ord=’ + ord + ‘?” type=”text/javascript”></scr’ + ‘ipt>’);
}
//–>
<A TARGET=”_new” HREF=”http://ad.doubleclick.net/click%3Bh=v8/37bb/3/0/%2a/n%3B207983201%3B0-0%3B1%3B18116989%3B4307-300/250%3B24995023/25012876/1%3B%3B%7Esscs%3D%3fhttp://www.greatharvestfresno.com/”><IMG SRC=”http://m1.2mdn.net/1731943/Blitz-GreatHarvest_300_0709.gif” BORDER=0></A> <a href=”http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/mi.frs00/Entertainment/Movies;dcove=d;pl=story;lvl6=DonaldMunro;ac=Columnist;loc=ats;pos=MREC01;sz=300×250;tile=4;ord=123456789?” target=”_blank”><img src=”http://ad.doubleclick.net/ad/mi.frs00/Entertainment/Movies;dcove=d;pl=story;lvl6=DonaldMunro;ac=Columnist;loc=ats;pos=MREC01;sz=300×250;tile=4;ord=123456789?” border=”0″ alt=”Advertisement”></a>
The 17-year-old Bee, who was born in Fresno but moved to Minnesota when he was a toddler, met Eastwood on the first day they had a scene together.
“Never once had I imagined I would be working next to Mr. Eastwood,” he says in a phone interview from his home in Robbinsdale, Minn.
Pretty heady stuff, especially for a kid who’d grown up watching Eastwood’s Westerns.
Bee plays Thao, a gentle-souled young man who lives next door to Eastwood’s character, the cantankerous Walt Kowalski. Thao is coerced by local gang members into trying to steal Walt’s prized Gran Torino car from his garage. When Walt thwarts the robbery, it sets in motion a chain of events that includes a grudgingly developing friendship between the two.
Films often are shot out of order, and “Gran Torino” was no exception. For his first scene with Eastwood, which takes place in the second half of the film, Bee had to shoot at a construction site. He remembers it was really hot that day. And he was really nervous.
He tried to think of something he could do to make a good first impression, but he sort of faltered. It didn’t matter.
“When I first met him, he was really down to earth, really humble, a really nice guy,” Bee says. “I started to tell myself every day that maybe we forget that these movie stars are human beings. I told myself that to get relaxed and not be so intimidated.”
Up until his first moment on camera, Bee’s only dramatic experience was backstage with a local theater group. He painted sets and worked on the sound.
He asked Eastwood early on if the director wanted him to rehearse by running lines together. The response: no.
“He told me that acting is not an intelligent art form, it is an instinctive art form,” Bee says.
As I talk with Bee, I’m struck by how refreshingly “un-Hollywood” he seems. Actors spend lots of time promoting their films in interviews, and they’re almost always effusive about how well the cast got along — how everyone was so friendly and got so close, etc., etc. (At least, that’s what they’re likely to say about their current film. Sometimes you can get them to open up about a past film experience.)
But Bee hasn’t developed that tendency toward spin. He doesn’t try to build his relationship with Eastwood into something it wasn’t. Even though the two of them forge a tender chemistry together on film — it’s one of the emotional high points — off-camera their contact was limited.
“I invited him to dinner once, but he was too busy,” Bee says.
It just goes to show what acting and editing can do to create the magic of movies — to create a relationship that is most poignant in the minds and hearts of the audience.
“Gran Torino” is the first mainstream film with a prominent Hmong-American story line. Eastwood takes great pains to have the film serve as sort of a primer for an American public that might not be familiar with Hmong culture — from the cuisine and local customs to an explanation of the historical Hmong involvement in the Vietnam War.
Bee isn’t sure what the overall reaction to the film will be, especially from members of the Hmong- American community. Some people likely will take issue with some of the small details of the film, such as the way a soul-calling ceremony with a shaman is depicted.
And he suspects that some will object to the emphasis on gangs. That’s just a device used in the film, he says. “It was never just about the Hmong community. It uses the backdrop of the gangsters to show the struggles that Walt and Thao are going through.”
Still, he hopes that people walk away from the film with a better awareness.
“I’m hoping that it does introduce people,” he says. “There are still some parts of the U.S. that haven’t heard of the Hmong people. We played a big role in the Vietnam War, and we deserve to be known.”
In many ways, Bee seems so unlike an “average” teenage movie star: cooing over the excitement of going to the world premiere of the film in Burbank; joking with his friends that he’ll be too shy to go with them when it opens in his hometown; hypercritical of his facial blemishes on-screen.
He wants to be a doctor, and the high school junior — who takes college classes already — is pretty sure that he’ll continue his honors- student path toward a pre-med degree.
Still, he likes this acting thing. “All I know is that I enjoyed this experience so much,” he says, almost shyly. “I think I want to pursue this some more.”
So, yes, he started at the top. Where does Bee Bee go from here?
Anywhere he wants.
The columnist can be reached at dmunro@fresnobee. com or (559) 441-6373. Read his blog at fresnobeehive.com/ donald.
Charles Wong, who was born in Vietnam, is part of a four-generation household in Milpitas. He lives with his mother, his 33-year-old daughter, her husband and their two children, and the arrangement feels normal. The average Vietnamese family has more than four
people in Santa Clara County, census data shows, compared with 3.03 people for whites.”In Vietnam, we usually live together with the parents, unless we have different jobs that are far away,” Wong said. In California, it’s also a way to share culture, especially home cooking, “so we don’t have McDonald’s every day,” he said. It made sense, Wong said, to take in his daughter and son-in-law when they had job problems.
Wong, a real estate agent who wants to retire but whose income helps support the family, views the arrangement as temporary.
“I want to help my daughter for awhile, until they are able to move out,” he said. “At my age, I want more quiet.”
California has the second-largest family size in the U.S. at 3.52 persons per family, behind only Utah.
In California, family size “is certainly driven more by immigration than by economics, but they are both responsible,” said Hans Johnson, a demographer with the Public Policy Institute of California.
After World War II, the average American family peaked at 3.72 persons in 1966, before dropping steadily through the 1970s and 1980s. Family size reached an all-time low of 3.13 persons in 2003. But average family size has not declined for the past five years, for the first time since World War II, according to the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey.
Meanwhile, a Census Bureau survey that covers a much larger share of U.S. households indicates the average American family is actually growing — particularly white and African-American families. Contrary to stereotypes, average family size for Latinos and Asians is shrinking.
First (extended) family
In Washington, the Obama family has determined that the new first lady’s mother will live in the White House.
“Mrs. Robinson has been a rock for the Obama family and an active grandma for the girls, especially over the last year while their parents were campaigning,” said Katie McCormick Lelyveld, a transition spokeswoman for the family. “Mrs. Robinson will be coming with the family to help the girls get acclimated, and she will determine in the coming months whether or not she wants to stay in D.C. permanently.”
A century ago, extended-family households were common in America. Today, beyond economic stresses and immigration, other forces are also reshaping American families.
With young people waiting longer to marry, and parenting styles becoming more “democratic” over the past 30 years, baby boomers’ adult children are likely to have closer relationships with their parents, Coontz said. More young adults get to know their parents as equals.
The increase in extended-family households is a well-developed trend, “but people haven’t recognized its implications,” said Coontz, author of “Marriage, A History.”
Even the Fielder-Erickson-Roberts family struggles to explain why their arrangement works.
“For the married-ons, for the husbands in our case, it takes a great deal of understanding to live with your in-laws,” Sondra Erickson said. “I think it takes a special person to do it and be comfortable with the situation.”
Sitting at their dinner table, Lynn Fielder, a Planned Parenthood executive in San Jose before Parkinson’s forced her to retire, agrees.
Recovering from brain surgery in October to stabilize her motor function, Fielder can focus on creating her jewelry in part because her mother drives Maya and her to appointments. Just now, she is working on a Parkinson’s fundraiser this month at Vino Locale, an art gallery in downtown Palo Alto.
Because of the family’s closeness, Maya gets to have special family experiences like playing music with her great-grandmother.
And Roberts, a vibrant nonagenarian who rides an exercise bike, quips that she won’t break up the family.
“I love it,” Roberts said of her living arrangement. “I promised Maya I would be around for her high school graduation, so I have another year to go.”
Contact Mike Swift at mswift@mercurynews.com or (408) 271-3648.
film – Laos – THE BETRAYAL (NERAKHOON)
January 20, 2009
by Andre Soares | SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “THE BETRAYAL (NERAKHOON) Trailer”, url: “http://www.altfg.com/blog/documentary/the-betrayal-nerakhoon-trailer/” }); | Leave a Comment
Written and directed by Ellen Kuras and Thavisouk Phrasavath, The Betrayal (Nerakhoon) follows a family of Lao immigrants in New York struggling to rebuild their lives after being forced to leave their native country. (Phrasavath’s father had collaborated with the CIA, choosing targets for U.S. bombings.)
Reviews have been highly positive. The New York Times‘ A. O. Scott called The Betrayal “contemplative and impressionistic,” while Newsweek’s David Ansen proclaimed it a “moving, lyrical … epic.”
The Betrayal has been nominated for the 2009 Spirit Awards and is one of the 15 semi-finalist documentaries in the running for the 2009 Academy Awards.
The Betrayal opens at Laemmle’s Music Hall in Beverly Hills on Jan. 16.
Vietnamese American film-makers launch new US distribution company
January 20, 2009
Timothy Linh Bui, Stephane Gauger, Ham Tran and Wyn Tran’s newly launched distributor Wave Releasing targeting Vietnamese-American and discerning independent audiences and will roll out its maiden title Owl And The Sparrow on January 16.
The Vietnamese-American partners have worked in various capacities on each other’s projects and were inspired to launch the company when Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Alfonso Cuaron and Guillermo del Toro launched cha cha cha.
Owl And The Sparrow, which won the audience award at the 2007 Los Angeles Film Festival, will open in limited theatres in Los Angeles, Irvine and Westminster before rolling out to San Francisco, San Jose, Houston, Chicago, and other cities in the coming weeks.
The film takes place in Saigon where a ten-year-old orphan plays matchmaker to a zookeeper and a beautiful flight attendant.
“We’re at a crossroads point in indie filmmaking and this was our way of helping to ensure that we’re on the correct side as the paradigm shift occurs,” Wave Releasing’s CEO and co-founder Bui said. “Starting the company was our response to the digital revolution and a way for us to reclaim a strong film and storytelling legacy.”
“What’s great about our company is that we all know and like each other and we end up working on each other’s films, so the move to join together and distribute our films was very much a natural one,” Gauger added.
Owl and the Sparrow blog and news
January 20, 2009
We hope you and your family have a wonderful holiday. 2008 has been an exciting and challenging year for us. We’re excited to announce that Owl and the Sparrow will open in Los Angeles and Orange County theaters today, January 16th, and will expand to major cities in January and February. If you’ve seen the film at a film festival, we invite you to experience this warm-hearted film again and bring your friends.
Check out the blog!
Owl and the Sparrow opens January 16th in Los Angeles and Orange County and expands the following week to major cities:
8000 W Sunset Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90046
9741 Chapman Ave
Garden Grove, CA 92841
(714) 534-4777
Edwards Westpark
3755 Alton Pky
Irvine, CA 92604
(949) 622-8609
Coming Soon:
January 23, 2008 – San Jose, Camera 3
Events:
January 16, 2009
Laemmle Sunset 5 -West Hollywood
Meet writer/director Stephane Gauger & Exec. Producer Timothy Linh Bui (Green Dragon, Three Seasons) @ the 7.15p & 9.45p showtimes for Q&A
January 17, 2009
Edwards Westpark 8 – Irvine
Q&A with writer/director Stephane Gauger @ 4.30p & 7.30p showtimes
By L.A. Weekly Film Critics
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
OWL AND THE SPARROW (Vietnam/USA) Writer-director Stephane Gauger’s lovely debut tracks a week in the lives of three young Vietnamese: a flight attendant on holiday, a zoo employee and a 10-year-old runaway. After suffering through multiple-storyline ensemble dramas like Crash and Babel, which resort to convoluted narrative coincidences to drive home humanistic messages, Owl and the Sparrow feels shockingly, refreshingly simple. Unfolding organically and honestly without a thought to making any larger points, the film’s look at loneliness and tentative connection is small-scaled but tremendously resonant. Special accolades to child actress Pham Thi Han, who doesn’t have a hammy or maudlin bone in her body.
For more dates, go to our website at:
To view trailer, click on
http://www.youtube. com/watch? v=qJB9ZQQiClY
Here’s what else we’ve been up to lately:
* Owl and the Sparrow was released theatrically in Japan and South Korea.
Owl and the Sparrow awards and nominations 2008 Nominee, Independent Spirit Awards – John Cassavetes Award
2007 Nominee, Gotham Awards – Breakthrough Director
Winner, Audience Award – Los Angeles Film Festival
Winner, Best Narrative Feature
San Francisco Asian American Film Festival
Dallas Asian Film Festival
San Diego Asian American Film Festival
Winner, NETPAC Award – Hawaii International Film Festival
Winner, Emerging Filmmaker – Starz Denver Film Festival
http://www.youtube. com/ WaveReleasing
htttp://www. owlandthesparrow . com/blog.html
Viet Q (Viet Kieu) News Blog 
