The photojournalist who won the Pulitzer for one of the most iconic pictures of our times is opening a photo exhibit at Nguoi Viet’s community room tomorrow Friday.

Nick Ut, whose photo of the crying naked girl fleeing napalm bombing was circulated around the world, and his friend Huynh Ngoc Dan will hold their joint exhibition on three days, from February 12 through 14, 11am to 6pm. The opening reception will be from 8pm to 9pm Friday.

Coincidentally, the two had planned this joint exhibit in Saigon in 2007. However, in the last minute, the local photography association, ticked off that they weren’t allowed more say in who’s invited to the opening, cancelled it. Many Vietnamese papers reported on the cancellation, for example here (in Vietnamese).

To this day, Nick Ut, whose Vietnamese name is Huỳnh Công Út, remains the only Viet to ever win the Pulitzer.

The exhibit features pictures Nick Ut had taken throughout his long career as a photojournalist, plus many photos he took on his own, not on assignment.

The above picture was taken at the Cấm bridge in Hai Phong, Vietnam.

The film that won the Audience Choice Award at the Vietnamese International Film Festival, a documentary about former orphans airlifted out of Vietnam at the end of the war, is coming to a film festival near you.

After the success at ViFF and at several other festivals including the director’s home town of Dallas, the film “Operation Babylift: The Lost Children of Vietnam” is coming to the San Diego Asian Film Festival. (Click here for tickets.) Director Tammy Nguyen Lee will be in attendance at the screening at 2:00 pm on Saturday October 24.

The director (pictured right) is a graduate of SMU’s Meadows School with a B.A. with honors in Cinema, and also a Bruin, having graduated from UCLA’s Producers Program with an MFA. She is also, get this, a former Miss Asian American Texas 1999-2000.

In a recent interview with the Bolsavik, Tammy Nguyen Lee says of audiences’ reactions, “People, many who weren’t even aware of this historic event, are inspired by the courage of the Babylift volunteers and moved by the struggle of the adoptees. No matter the age, no matter the race, this is a relatable story that has universal themes and is touching lives and hearts everywhere.”

(The interview will be published on Nguoi Viet. You just got a preview ahead of everyone else. Lucky you.)

The film Operation Babylift: The Lost Children of Vietnam features many compelling interviews with not just former adoptees and their families, but also American volunteers who had worked in orphanages in Saigon during the war and who were involved in the airlift.

Operation Babylift was an initiative approved by President Gerald Ford to retrieve 2,500 Vietnamese orphans during the last days of the war and bring them to safety in the U.S. Even with the best of intentions, however, the orphans, all of whom found adopting families, grew up facing unique challenges.

The movie follows a number of these former orphans who are now grown men and women in their thirties, and explore their issues including prejudice and identity crisis.

Other upcoming festival showings:

*   Vancouver Asian Film Festival (1:30 pm, Sun Nov 8th)

*   St. Louis International Film Festival (5:00 pm, Sat Nov 21st)

Next year, on the 35th anniversary of the end of the war and of Operation Babylift, the film will be shown at numerous events throughout the country. Click here for updated information on future screenings.

“Egret Dancing”

With this photo, My Phuong Nguyen of Burtonsville, Maryland won the Grand Prize in the 2009 Maryland Natural Resource Magazine Photo Contest.

The contest was run by the Maryland Department of Natural Resources.

The photo, entitled “Egret Dancing,” also won her the First Place in the Wild Plants and the Birds categories, says the DNR in a press release here.

In the press release, the department also reveals that more than 300 photographers submitted nearly 1,500 photos this year.

A painting by Vietnamese-American artist Nguyen Van Bay has been selected to be part of the California Contemporary Art Collection 2009-2010 Art Exhibit at the state Capitol in Sacramento, according to a press release from the office of State Senator Lou Correa.

The painting above, entitled “Light and Trust,” has been selected to represent Correa’s senate district, which covers Garden Grove, Santa Ana, Anaheim, and chunks of Westminster, Stanton, Buena Park, Fullerton.

Artist Nguyen Van Bay (pictured right) was born in Chau Doc, in the southwest part of Vietnam, in 1938. He was graduated from Vietnam’s premiere art school in Gia Dinh in 1961 and for several decades taught painting in Saigon. Back in the 1960s, Bay won a serious number of international awards.

On Nguoi Viet Daily News, Bay says his painting represents his hope for peace and prosperity for Vietnamese everywhere “through faith in the Virgin Mary.”

A reception to honor the artist is planned for 8:30pm Thursday November 8 at Viet Bao Daily News, 14841 Moran Street, half a block down from the Bolsavik’s office.

The California Contemporary Art Collection program (info on the Capitol Museum web site here – may need to scroll down) began in 1997 and is intended to represent a variety of art for the state’s numerous senate districts.

The selected art will be hung in offices behind the Senate Chambers.

Every year for 7 years now, the Vietnamese-American Arts & Letters Association (VAALA) has been holding a Mid-Autumn Festival Painting Contest for kids.

The Mid-Autumn Festival, probably originally a harvest festival, has evolved in tradition to become the Vietnamese day for kids.

Since 2003, VAALA (web site here) has been holding the annual painting competition for kids. As a measure of how strong the tradition has been going: Some kids who participated in the first competition are now in college; and some babies born in the year of the first competition are now participating in it.

This year’s competition took place on Saturday October 3, with the award ceremony the day after.

Enjoy the photos of people enjoying themselves.

Photos from the day of the contest are by Nguoi Viet reporter Ngoc Lan, used with permission.

The floor is as good a space as any to create art.

.

.

.

We’re given fingers for a reason…

.

.

The day after the competition, VAALA held the award ceremony.

The jury, by the way, consists of Audrey Yamagata Noji, Santa Ana Unified School Board Member; Don Cribb, chairman of the Santa Ana Arts Council; and three Vietnamese-American painters: Lệ Chi; Nguyễn Ðình Thuần; and Nguyễn Việt Hùng.

Entertainment at the award ceremony included everything from mid-Autumn tunes played on traditional Vietnamese musical instruments; to a hip-hop number.

Every kid that showed up was given a lighted lantern, which they then used to follow the Lion Dance troupe around, in a Mid-Autumn tradition known in Vietnamese as “rước đèn.”

The following photos are by the Bolsavik.

.

This is Kevin Phan, frequently seen on Thế Hệ Trẻ music videos. He does his homework while waiting for his turn to perform.

.

And this shy but justly proud kid is Steven Phan, who won second place in the 5-to-7 age group.

These kids are from the Lac Hong traditional music group, probably the organization most dedicated to propagating traditional Vietnamese music in the United States.

.

 .

These kids actually all come from the same music school, the Spotlight School in Garden Grove.

.

.

VAALA is, of course, the same organization that put together the biennual Vietnamese International Film Festival (web site here; see Bolsavik collected entries here) as well as the FOB II: Art Speaks exhibit (see Bolsavik collected entries here).

Up-and-coming Quynh Nguyen (Nguyễn Thúy Quỳnh in Vietnamese spelling), currently based in New York City, is slated to perform the Piano Quintet in F Minor by Cesar Franck with the the Biava Quartet, at 8pm on June 27. See the Festival’s web site here.

Back in 2001 or 2002, the Bolsavik was talking with Dang Thai Son, the first Asian to ever win the Chopin International Piano Competition – and asked him about the next generation of Vietnamese piano performers.

And Dang Thai Son said, in his opinion, the next great Vietnamese hope for a world-class pianist is none other than Quynh Nguyen.

Born in Hanoi, Quynh Nguyen (web site here) was admitted to the Hanoi Conservatory at age six, performed her first public recital at age eight, and had her orchestral premiere at age eleven, playing Mozart‘s Piano Concerto in D Minor. At thirteen she received a scholarship to study piano performance at the Gnessin Institute in Moscow.

Nguyen is a graduate of The Juilliard School and of Mannes College of Music. Currently working on her DMA degree, she is also teaching at Hunter College and the International Keyboard Institute and Festival at Mannes.

In 2004 Quynh Nguyen won the Fulbright Fellowship to study with Yvonne Loriod Messiaen  (wiki here) in Paris.

The Boston Globe once said (here) of Quynh’s playing: “she knows how to make (the music) dazzle with lively rhythm, piquant inflexions, and dashing virtuosity.”

The Rockport Chamber Music Festival (web site here) is a 5-week celebration of classical music held annually in Rockport, Massachussetts. This year marks the 28th time of this remarkable and highly touted classical music event.

Date, time, place:

8:00 pm, June 27, 2009
Rockport Art Association
12 Main Street,
Rockport, MA

Tickets range from $22 to $40.
Buy tix online here.

The one-day event, dubbed “Hay Qua!” – Vietnamese for, well, “That’s neat!” – brings together a wide array of talent, from music to fashion and food.

In the film area, guests include many filmmakers whose works have been shown at ViFF, including Doan Hoang, director of “Oh Saigon”; Ina Adele Ray, the director of “El Paso, Vietnam”; Kim Spurlock, director of “Buoi Chieu”; and Jared Rehberg, an associate producer of “Operation Babylift: The Lost Children of Vietnam” who is himself one of the lifted babies featured in the award-winning documentary.

Registration price is $60; early-bird discounted price is $50. Maybe it’s normal for New York….

See the press release here.

Time date & location:

“Hay Qua!” Mini-Fest
Saturday, June 27th / 10-4PM
The Bitter End (147 Bleecker St, NYC)
Register: www.thatsneaat.com

The Register has this story about the protest against the Brian Doan photo exhibit at Cypress College. It has a video too, which the Bolsavik has embedded at the end of this entry. Watch to through and check out the videographer’s first name. How apropos!

Excerpts from the Reg’s story by Michael Mello:

Over the past week, representatives of the Vietnamese community have twice met with Cypress College officials. Both times they were told that the photo will remain on exhibit.

“We’ve had a great dialogue,” college President Michael Kasler said, as he watched the crowd in front of the arts building. “I listened to their concerns. … We’re not taking the art down, but this is America. We can have different views.” He has invited Vietnamese-American groups to hold a forum at the campus this spring to share their views.

Kasler said he told them his own grandparents in Ukraine perished at the hands of communists during World War II. Still, he doesn’t believe Doan’s photo and its subject to be propaganda.

“To me, she’s not advocating communism,” Kasler said. “She looks very forlorn.”

Doan has said he sees the photograph as free expression he would not be allowed to make in Vietnam.

Here’s the video. Click here to watch if the embedding doesn’t work.