Inaugural Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise Goes to Ham Tran

Ham Tran, writer/director of JOURNEY FROM THE FALL (photo by Carol Petersen)

Annual Awards Presentation: Thursday, April 2, 2009

New York, February 9, 2009 - Legendary stage and screen director Mike Nichols will receive the 2009 Vilcek Prize in the arts. “We have been awarding these prizes annually since 2006,” said Dr. Jan Vilcek, President and Cofounder of the Vilcek Foundation, “and this year I’m proud to announce the expansion of our awards program with the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise, to recognize the successes of foreign-born individuals in the early stages of their careers in the arts and biomedical sciences.” Filmmaker Ham Tran has been named the first Creative Promise Prize recipient in the arts.

Of the new prize category, Marica Vilcek, Vice President and Cofounder of the Vilcek Foundation, explained, “We have always wanted to honor and publicize the contributions of a younger generation of immigrants working in the arts and sciences, to help them maximize their potential. Jan and I were in the early stages of our careers when we immigrated to the United States, and the professional support we received here was pivotal to our success.” The Vilcek Prizes for Creative Promise are presented to foreign-born individuals, 38 years old or younger, in the fields of biomedical science and the arts.

At the awards presentation, to be held at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in New York City, Thursday, April 2, 2009, Mr. Nichols and Dr. Huda Zoghbi, the 2009 recipient of the Vilcek Prize in biomedical science, will each receive a $50,000 cash award and a commemorative trophy created by designer Stefan Sagmeister. Creative Promise Prize winners Mr. Tran and Dr. Howard Chang, the 2009 recipient of the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in biomedical science, will each receive a $25,000 cash award and a plaque, also designed by Mr. Sagmeister.

The Vilcek Foundation, in meeting its primary purpose, to call attention to the accomplishments of immigrants currently working in United States, also serves to remind the public of the immeasurable contributions of the foreign-born to this country throughout its history. Dr. Vilcek points out, “Mike Nichols, the 2009 Vilcek Prize winner in the arts, is universally acclaimed for his film and theater work, but few realize that he, too, was born overseas, reminding us that the American movie industry in large part owes its growth and worldwide preeminence to immigrants.”

This year’s Vilcek Prize recipients demonstrate the truly global influence of America’s immigrants: Mike Nichols was born in Berlin, Germany; Dr. Huda Zoghbi in Beirut, Lebanon; Ham Tran in Saigon, Vietnam; and Dr. Howard Chang, in Taipei, Taiwan.

The 2009 arts winners were chosen by independent panels of experts. The jury for the Vilcek Prize included: producer Rudy Behlmer; Chuck Boller, Executive Director, the Hawaii International Film Festival; Geoffrey Gilmore, Director, the Sundance Film Festival; Rick Jewell, Professor, USC School of Cinematic Arts; Rajendra Roy, the Celeste Bartos Chief Curator of Film, the Museum of Modern Art; and Richard Schickel, Film Critic, TIME Magazine.  The jury for the Creative Promise Prize included: Sheril D. Antonio, Associate Professor and Associate Dean of Film, TV, and New Media, New York University; Rick Kinsel, Executive Director, the Vilcek Foundation; Ysa Le, Executive Director, the Vietnamese American Arts and Letters Association; Wesley Morris, Movie Critic, The Boston Globe; Lisa Schwarzbaum, Film Critic, Entertainment Weekly; and film producer Janet Yang.

About the Prize Recipients

Mike Nichols

Through his groundbreaking work in improvisational comedy, theater, and film, Mike Nichols has, for almost a half-century, shown us that through honesty - in particular, the special brand of honesty conferred by humor - we can make some sense of life, and when we can’t, to laugh at it. Only the most ardent of film and theater buffs, however, knows that this virtuoso of the American entertainment landscape was not born on American soil.
Mike Nichols began life as Michael Peschkowsky, in Berlin, the son of a Russian-born father and a German mother. With the voice of Hitler still ringing in his ears, he escaped to this country in 1939. Smart and quick-witted, early on Mr. Nichols found the power in humor, and began to master its intricacies, often using his childhood experiences as seed for laughter. He worked the ground while at the University of Chicago in the early 1950s, where luck landed him among a talented theater group; full germination occurred when he met and paired with the brilliant Elaine May. For four years, the duo refined the art of improvisational comedy.
After the pair broke up, Mr. Nichols found something he was even better at than comedy: directing. In less than ten years (1963−1972), he directed five hit plays on Broadway and won four Tonys. In 1966, he made the move to Hollywood. Directing the film version of Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf earned him his first Academy Award nomination; the four leading actors were also nominated, a first in Academy history. He took an Oscar home for his second film, The Graduate, at the same time launching his reputation for audacious casting and an uncanny ability to bring out the best in actors.
Over the years, Mr. Nichols has proved to be consistently light on his directorial feet, moving deftly between stage, screen, and television; along the way, he added producer to his skill set. He is one of the elite in show business to have won all the major entertainment awards: Oscar, Tony, Emmy, and Grammy. He has twice more been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director (Silkwood and Working Girl), and once as producer (The Remains of the Day).  In addition to his Oscar, his awards shelf is weighed down by an astounding nine Tonys (Barefoot in the Park, Luv, The Odd Couple, Plaza Suite, The Prisoner of Second Avenue, Annie, The Real Thing, Spamalot, and Whoopi), one Grammy (Best Comedy Album, An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May), and four Emmys (two for Wit and two for Angels in America). He is the recipient of the George Abbott Award, the Lincoln Center Lifetime Achievement Award, the Kennedy Center Honor, and the Directors Guild of America Lifetime Achievement Award; he also has been recognized by the American Museum of the Moving Image for his contributions to the film industry. He is a co-founder of the New Actors Workshop in New York City.

Ham Tran

In the films of Ham Tran, stories gone untold too long are unraveled, voices kept silent too long are heard. They are the stories of the Vietnamese boat people and the survivors of the reeducation camps, and they are not easy to tell.

Born in Saigon, Mr. Tran immigrated as a refugee at the age of eight to America, with his ethnic Chinese Vietnamese parents. The desire to regain memories lost during the process of assimilation⎯“institutionalized amnesia,” he calls it⎯drew him to poetry, prose, playwriting, and, eventually, filmmaking. Even before leaving college, with a BA in English Literature from UCLA and an MFA from the UCLA School of Film and Television, Mr. Tran’s multifaceted talent for storytelling on film became evident⎯he writes, directs, edits, and produces. His first two short films, The Prescription and Pomegranate were semifinalists for the Student Academy Awards; and his 28-minute thesis film, The Anniversary, about two brothers separated by the Vietnam War, qualified for an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short, in 2004, and has won more than 30 international film festival awards.

While working on The Anniversary, Mr. Tran became aware that no film had ever been made about the war years in Vietnam, from the Vietnamese perspective. His first feature film, Journey from the Fall, emerged from that realization. Inspired by a true story, it chronicles one family’s struggle for freedom as they flee their country after the fall of Saigon in 1975, as well as those forced to stay behind. Journey from the Fall was an Official Selection for the 2006 Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for the FIPRESCI Award for Best ASEAN Film at the 2006 Bangkok Film Festival; it has won 16 international awards.

Mr. Tran is now working on his second feature film, Distant Country, about two Vietnamese illegal immigrants whose dreams of reaching the United States take them on a journey around the world. Another new project is a documentary film, tentatively titled, Sponsored ’75, which traces the lives of Vietnamese families rescued from four American refugee camps in 1975, and their sponsors.

Mr. Tran is part of a new Vietnamese filmmaking movement called the Viet Wave, whose mission is to bring Vietnamese-content films to American movie houses through Wave Releasing, the first Vietnamese-American film distribution company. He is an active member of the Asian and Pacific Islander community and serves on the board of the Vietnamese American Arts and Letters Association. He has also directed a promotional video for the Vietnamese Overseas Initiative for Conscience and Empowerment, and worked with the Orange County Asian and Pacific Islander Community Alliance to create a curriculum around Journey from the Fall to help change the way the history of the Vietnam War is taught in high schools across America.

About the Vilcek Foundation

The Vilcek Foundation aims to raise public awareness of the contributions of immigrants to the sciences, arts, and culture in the United States. The Foundation was established in 2000 by Jan and Marica Vilcek, immigrants from the former Czechoslovakia. The mission of the Foundation was inspired by the couple’s careers in biomedical science and art history, respectively, as well as their personal experiences and appreciation for the opportunities offered them as newcomers to the United States. In addition to awarding annual prizes in the biomedical science and the arts, the Vilcek Foundation showcases the work of innovative artists, filmmakers, and others, many of them immigrants who have yet to achieve critical or financial success, at its headquarters at 167 East 73rd Street, New York City.
Former recipients of the Vilcek Prize in the arts include: architect/urban planner Denise Scott Brown; artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude; and classical music composer Osvaldo Golijov. Previous recipients of the Vilcek Prize in biomedical science are: Dr. Rudolf Jaenisch, founding member of the Whitehead Institute at MIT; Dr. Joan Massagué, Chairman of the Cancer and Biology Genetics Program at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center; and Dr. Inder Verma, a professor and researcher at the Salk Institute.
For more information about the Foundation, please visit www.vilcek.org.