Biography

People’s Artist Pham Ky Nam (June 27, 1928 – March 3, 1984) was a Vietnamese director and screenwriter. One of the most influential pioneers in the 1960s Vietnamese revolutionary cinema, he received formal training at IDEHEC Paris and began his career at Vietnam Feature Film Studio by filming re-enactments of works written for theatre. In 1959, in collaboration with documentarist Nguyen Hong Nghi, he directed North Vietnam’s first feature film since the liberation from France and of the revolutionary cinema genre, “Chung một dòng sông”(On the same river). His films are also successful, with Ms. Tư Hậu (1962) considered one of the best Vietnamese films in history and a timeless classics beloved by national audience. His style is noted for a distinctive kinetic, high-contrast cinematography and a disposition to humanist and realist themes in his psychological dramas. With his contributions to Vietnamese cinema since its inception, Pham Ky Nam was posthumously awarded the State Prize for Literature and Arts by the Vietnamese government in 2007 and the title of People's Artist in 2012.

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