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ViFF continues today at UC Irvine with a couple sets of shorts and a special spotlight session on Dustin Nguyen who, several years ago, starred in the action TV series “21 Jump Street” as Officer Harry Truman Ioki - a cop who goes under cover as a high school student and who recently became the hottest Viet actor with his role in The Rebel, known in Vietnamese as Dòng Máu Anh Hùng.

Shown tonight will be Little Fish (pictured right) where Dustin will be in various states of undress and kissing Cate Blanchett.

The special session on Dustin Nguyen starts at 6pm with a reception hosted by Wells Fargo (you know, that bank whose profit report buoyed the stock market last week), followed by the screening.

Also shown today will be two sets of shorts running parallel at 12 noon and a third set at 3pm. All events today will be at UC Irvine, HIB 100.

In the third set of shorts is a special sneak preview of director Leo Chiang’s documentary A Village Called Versailles, a powerful story of the Vietnamese community in Louisiana uniting and standing up against the government’s plan to place a landfill right next to their neighborhood, post-Katrina.

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The Vietnamese International Film Festival launches its second week-end with a day of free screenings held at UCLA tomorrow Thursday April 9.

Starting at 4pm will be a set of short films including the hard hitting Life Out of a Stone (in Vietnamese: Đội Đá Vá Đời) - a 19-minute documentary by Hồ Thanh Tuấn, on laborers who cut and carry stones using crude hand tools. Also included is the animated Cuội and the Banyan Tree (right) by Tạ Thanh Hải, telling a Vietnamese fantasy about the man in the moon.

At 7:30pm is When Autumn Sunlight Comes (in Vietnamese: Khi Nắng Thu Về), a feature from by Vietnam’s Bùi Trung Hải. The film won a Gold Remi at the WorldFest-Houston film festival in 2008.

The director is already in town and will be at the screening for Q&A.

Click here for a full schedule, with film synopsis.

Highlights for the next few days of ViFF:

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Vietnam’s national film awards, called the Golden Kite Awards, were given out Sunday night, and Vietnamese-American filmmakers walked off with a sizable chunk of the prizes. The Vietnamese-language Thanh Niên has a list of winners here.

Dustin Nguyen, of 21 Jump Street fame (pictured right, from the movie The Rebel), captured the best actor award for his role in The Legend is Alive (Vietnamese title: Huyền thoại bất tử), helmed by Vietnamese-American director Luu Huynh.

Luu also won the best director award for the film.

Kathy Uyen, an OC resident, walked off with the best supporting actress award for her role in Passport to Love (Vietnamese: Chuyện tình xa xứ), directed by L.A.-born and OC-based Victor Vu (see this entry).

There was no award for best film, instead the organizers gave two co-runner-up awards (the “Silver Kites”) to two films, and The Legend is Alive won one of them.

If the organizers could not decide on a best film, others were not so undecisive. The media panel awarded a Golden Kite for best film to Owl and the Sparrow, a feature film shot entirely on a handheld steadycam, by first-time Vietnamese-American director Stéphane Gauger. Owl also won in the strangely named category “best film in coproduction with a foreign country” - a madeup category first used in 2004 to give an award to The Buffalo Boy (Vietnamese: Mùa Len Trâu), directed by UCLA grad Nghiem-Minh Nguyen-Vo.

The audience voted for another Golden Kite best film award for Passport to Love.

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