Awards

Đức Ngô Ngọc

The Vietnamese-German director & writer Duc Ngo Ngoc was born in Hanoi and later moved to Berlin as the son of GDR contract workers. In award-winning films such as “Apples and Oranges,” “Farewell Halong” and “Trading Happiness,” he processes his personal experiences of migration and presents his perspective on the issue. His short film “Apples and Oranges” won the Best Short Film award at the Viet Film Fest in 2018. “Farewell Halong” and “Trading Happiness” were also part of the official selection at the Viet Film Fest. 

Triggered by the lack of diversity in the film business, Ngô Ngọc founded the documentary-based workshop “Dreh’s Um” for Vietnamese-German youth. For his intercultural media work he was awarded with the Dieter Baacke Prize 2022. His passion for documentary film also influences his approach on fictional sets. He enjoys working with amateur actors and loves to play with hybrid formats, especially when developing scripts and rehearsing with actors. Ngô Ngọc is particularly interested in merging comedic elements with tragic tones to reach large audiences. In addition to cinema, he therefore worked on Grimme Award nominated series such as “Wir” and “Echt ” in 2021 and 2022. 

Recently, he wrote and directed an episode of the six-part drama series “Made in Germany,” which tells the stories of a group of friends who grew up in Berlin in the second generation. Together, they face challenges in establishing their roles in society, chasing individual aspirations, contemplating their identities, and confronting life’s profound questions.

Van B. Nguyen

Van B. Nguyen is a queer Vietnamese-American writer/director who hails from Texas. She developed a career in production, starting as a set PA, then Assistant Director before making the leap as a working writer. Her short films have been screened at several film festivals and she was chosen to be on the WeForShe 2019 WriteHer List in addition to being a 2020 Film Independent Episodic Lab fellow and their 2021’s Film Independent Project Involve fellow. Van wrote a produced action feature, Blackout, currently streaming on Netflix. She is also a writer on CBS’s Blue Bloods while continuing to develop film and TV projects.

Y Thien Nguyen

Y Thien Nguyen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian Pacific Studies at California State University, Dominguez Hills. He previously served as a Teaching Fellow in South East Asian History at the University of Leeds, UK and a Research Associate for the US-Vietnam Research Center at the University of Oregon. He was also the Resource Development Manager at the Vietnamese-American non-profit Boat People S.O.S., Inc. His research focuses on Southeast Asia during the Cold War and the history of the Vietnam War and Vietnamese refugee communities. His work has been published in the Journal of Asian American Studies and several edited volumes on Vietnamese and Vietnamese American history and politics.

Elyse Dinh

Elyse has been acting for about a thousand years, after she saw Ali McGraw die beautifully in Love Story at the Rex theater in Saigon. She didn’t know how the moving pictures got onto the screen but they felt like magic and she wanted to be inside them. Elyse works in film, TV, theater, and podcasts/radio, as an actor and acting/dialect coach. Credits include recent VFF “alumni” Daughter and The Family Circus, as well as hit shows such as Tracker, Watchmen (the HBO series), Grey’s Anatomy, Better Things, and Queen Sugar. She loves eating pho and dancing to disco music, sometimes simultaneously.

Ham Tran

Tran received his MFA in Directing from the UCLA School of Film and Television. His first two short films The Prescription and Pomegranate were finalists for the Student Academy Awards®, and his thesis film The Anniversary was Short-listed for the 2004 Academy Awards® for Best Live Action Short. In addition to fixing many of Vietnam’s biggest box office hits, Tran has successfully written, directed and edited 7 feature films and 2 streaming series. His first feature, Journey from the Fall, premiered at the prestigious 2006 Sundance Film Festival and in 2019 was listed by the LA Times as one of the  20 Asian American cannon films in the last 20 years. In 2022, Tran returned to Sundance with a family sci-fi film, Maika. In 2023, Tran wrote and directed a true-crime series calls Missing on the Ever of Tet which was released on Galaxy Play 2024. The success of this series was followed up with a Netflix Original series for Vietnam called Devil’s Diner, which drops in December 2024.

Tran is currently preparing for an action-suspense film called 52 Minutes, which is based on the hijacking of a commercial airline in 1977. In 2025, he will film an anthology horror feature called Red Thread. The feature will be also followed by an anthology series, which will both be released at the end of 2025. 

He continues to direct commercials and branded short films in between his feature film and streaming work. Tran also produces and develops projects as a co-founder of East Films –– a creative studio focused on pan-Asian stories for a global audience. When he’s not working, Tran enjoys karaoke and is known as HamPod for his musical knowledge! 

Viet Nguyen

Viet Nguyen is a film and tv director whose recent credits include Brothers Sun, Party Down, Let the Right One In, Reboot, and The Midnight Club. He is a former PA, assistant editor, editor, and indie filmmaker. He has proudly showcased at least half a dozen shorts at Viet Film Fest over the years and directed and co-wrote the award-winning feature film, Crush the Skull, which screened at Viet Film Fest in 2016.

Viet is an Austin native who graduated from film school at the University of Texas. He’s known for his Southern charm and firm handshake, but his real talent, according to his wife, is he’s super handsome. (Viet’s wife did not approve of this bio.)

Lastly, Viet is constantly mistaken for the Pulitzer-prize winning author, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and has signed several of his books on his behalf.