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Tony Bui is telling the story of the Vietnam war’s ‘napalm girl’, 25 years after Sundance hit Three Seasons

  • Why the celebrated Vietnamese-American director tracked down Kim Phuc, the screaming young girl seen in newspapers around the world and Nick Ut, the photographer who took the tragic 1972 Vietnam war image

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Tony Bui’s Three Seasons was the first American film to be made in Vietnam after president Bill Clinton lifted a historic embargo. Photo: courtesy Hopper Stone
Stephen McCarty

Tony Bui has gone the extra mile to bring you this interview. Caught in one of China’s recent biblical rainstorms, the film director, writer and producer found himself lost in an unfamiliar, chaotic Beijing.

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“It’s my first time here,” he says via Zoom, almost two hours after our scheduled appointment, “and unfortunately I don’t speak the language. I was stuck: I took the wrong bus, got off the bus, I was soaked – my shoes, socks, everything.

“I tried to grab a cab; couldn’t get one, couldn’t call a ride: Didi, the service in Beijing, is not that efficient. And in the storm no car would come anyway. So I asked a shopkeeper, who directed me to the subway. But the subway was crazy-packed because everyone was trying to take it. So I couldn’t even get in …”

Persistence eventually paid off for the unnecessarily apologetic Bui, who from a dry hotel room describes his recent, happier appearance at the Asia Society, in Hong Kong, where he moderated a talk that included fellow filmmaker Derek Tsang Kwok-cheung.

“We had a huge crowd and they showed my film. Full house, beautiful venue,” he says.

Vietnamese-American director Tony Bui describes the highs and soggy lows of taking his Sundance-celebrated 1999 film Three Seasons back on the road and his forthcoming project on the ‘napalm girl’. Photo: courtesy Tony Bui
Vietnamese-American director Tony Bui describes the highs and soggy lows of taking his Sundance-celebrated 1999 film Three Seasons back on the road and his forthcoming project on the ‘napalm girl’. Photo: courtesy Tony Bui

As we speak, Bui is concluding a series of visits to regional cities, including Hong Kong, organised by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at New York’s Columbia University, where he is artist in residence.

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