Tony Bui

Tony Bui is the first returning Vietnamese to make a film in the country in which he was born (but left at the age of two ); the 26-year-old was raised in Sunnyvale, Silicon Valley). The film he made was a short called Yellow Lotus and it paved the way, four years later, for Three Seasons, the first US-financed feature to be made in Vietnam. Shot more than a year ago, Three Seasons burst on to the international scene at the start of 1999. It was the first film to win both the Grand Prix and the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival, and it arrives in Berlin for a competition screening on Monday.

For Bui, whose accent is unmistakably Sunnyvale, but whose sensibility has undergone a seismic shift over the past seven years, both his films - but especially Three Seasons - are a product of his unforgettable first visit "home" in 1992.

Where the heart is

"For the past six years I've been kind of dividing my time between Vietnam and here," he said in Los Angeles last summer as he worked on the final mix of the film. "I left when I was two years old and I knew nothing about the country, so I was sent back by my parents to understand more about the culture and the country and to regain my heritage.

"I ended up falling in love with the place. I re-learnt the language and spent the next six years there. And what I witnessed was a country that was not represented in American cinema or in Western cinema as a whole. I saw a humanity that's not in any of the films.

"You know, Vietnam films have all been about war or politics - people are always running round in the jungle holding guns. But what I witnessed there was something completely different. And the thing I want to do most is to present a film entirely shot in Vietnam in which the actors are speaking in the Vietnamese language. I mean, all the films about Vietnam are shot in Thailand, the Philippines or Paris, and, in a lot of them, people aren't even speaking real Vietnamese.

"So I wanted all that to be very authentic. I wanted to present these sort of struggles and the hopes and dreams of the people so that, slowly, as you watch it, you realise it's just like every other country. Hopefully, someone in Kansas or Germany can relate to it as well as someone in Vietnam."

But first, Bui, who had grown up in the US thinking of himself as Vietnamese, had to find out what it meant to actually be Vietnamese, not a "Viet Kieu" - a member of the millions-strong Vietnamese diaspora that has spread around the world since the wars began in the 1950s. "The whole dynamics of the Viet Kieu and Vietnam is quite interesting," Bui says.

"There's something like 500,000 Viet Kieus that go through Vietnam every year. A lot come back, and the nationals like the Viet Kieus, because they come with their money. But they don't come with the right attitude. They come thinking somehow they're better than the Vietnamese in Vietnam. I touch upon that a little bit in Three Seasons."

But the film - held together by the character of James Hager (Harvey Keitel), a US veteran who is looking for the daughter he fathered during the war & - chiefly tells of three experiences of getting by in modern-day Vietnam. The first tale is that of a "cyclo" (cycle-rickshaw) driver who falls in love with a highly paid call girl. The second is that of a woman whose livelihood - selling traditional white lotus blossoms - is threatened by imported plastic flowers that never wilt and even have the scent of the real thing. And the third is that of a street kid who was called Mickey Mouse in the script, but who ends up in the film as Woody Woodpecker because Disney objected to Bui using one of its character names and Universal didn't.

The film was shot entirely in Vietnam, using a mixed US-Vietnamese crew, with the local censor signing off every single shot. Bui conceded that shooting in Vietnam wasn't easy. There was very little equipment and very little infrastructure. But there were a few consolations.

"It's funny," he says, "but sometimes I say it's almost easier to shoot in Vietnam because the trade-off is that they don't shoot films all the time, so when a picture does come in, you get a lot of support in ways that you wouldn't get in New York. You can get permits for anything you want, so long as you know how to get through the bureaucracy and the red tape."

What they couldn't find, though, was the lotus-covered lake to form the setting of the second story. "We did a major search for this location for over a year all over Southern Vietnam. But all we found was the lake. Then we had to grow, like, 10,000 lotus bushes in it. So we spent three months before doing the scene - which only took a week to shoot - growing the lotuses.

"But we couldn't grow white lotuses in that mud, so we had to grow red ones and then, for weeks before, pick out all the red flowers and replace them with white plastic blossoms. The irony is that the film's about the contrast between purity of the real flowers and the fake plastic ones. But to get the idea across, we actually had to shoot fake plastic flowers."