The view was shared during the seminar “The US Film Industry: A Successful Model and Lessons for Vietnam,” held on July 3 as part of the 4th Da Nang Asian Film Festival (DANAFF IV).
The event examined the factors behind the global success of the U.S. film industry while exploring practical lessons and policy recommendations for building a professional, modern, and sustainable film ecosystem in Vietnam.
Vietnam has powerful stories but has yet to fully unlock them on screen
Human capital has long been regarded as one of the foundations of a thriving film industry. At the seminar, director Phan Gia Nhat Linh presented a paper titled The Characteristics of US Film Education and Its Advantages for Asian Countries, Particularly Vietnam.
According to him, Vietnam’s film schools generally offer broad-based education but have yet to establish distinctive identities or specialized strengths that set individual institutions apart.
He noted that the current training system still faces several shortcomings, including weak links with the professional film industry, uneven opportunities for hands-on production experience, limited specialization, and insufficient emphasis on film production.
Several specialized disciplines are still absent from academic curricula, while interdisciplinary education connecting filmmaking with technology and digital media has considerable room for growth.
Vietnam’s history, wars, collective memories, rapid urbanization, and rich cultural heritage all provide powerful cinematic material that has yet to be fully explored, particularly from an educational perspective. The country also possesses a vast reservoir of folklore, historical narratives, and diverse social experiences.
Rather than learning to tell stories exactly as Hollywood does, he argued, Vietnam should learn to master modern storytelling tools to tell its own stories more effectively.
“The US film education model is successful not simply because it produces blockbuster movies,” he said. “It succeeds because it trains creative professionals who can collaborate, adapt and operate within a complete cinematic ecosystem.”
For Vietnam, studying this model offers an opportunity to modernize film education, improve the quality of its creative workforce, and gradually develop filmmaking into a genuine cultural industry.
Phan Gia Nhat Linh also argued that, in today’s content-driven era, Vietnam needs more than simply producing more filmmakers.
“We need filmmakers who understand their own country more deeply. We should diversify film literature and cultivate a new generation of students who read literature, philosophy and history alongside cinema.”
He stressed that the ultimate goal is not to build “another Hollywood in Asia” but to create a Vietnamese film industry strong enough to compete internationally while preserving its own cultural identity.
“Ultimately, filmmakers should not simply produce content. They should become storytellers with knowledge, identity and social responsibility. To reach global audiences, we need stories that are deeply rooted in local culture,” he said.
Building on Hollywood’s strengths while finding Vietnam’s own voice
Director Trinh Dinh Le Minh presented a paper titled American Cinema in Directing Education: From Standardized Film Language to the Challenges of Creative Thinking.
He argued that, in many ways, American cinema has democratized filmmaking education. Young film students in Vietnam, South Korea, or Brazil can all access the same cinematic grammar through Hollywood films.
Yet that accessibility also creates challenges.
“When Hollywood becomes the center of film education, students may unconsciously accept American cinematic language as the default framework for every film,” he said.
As a result, other forms of cinema – slower, less dramatic, or more contemplative works – are often viewed as less legitimate artistic choices.
Conversely, some students reject Hollywood altogether and attempt to imitate celebrated auteurs before first mastering the fundamentals of storytelling and visual language.
For that reason, he argued, Hollywood’s greatest educational value lies not in offering a perfect filmmaking formula but in providing students with a foundation for understanding how cinema works.
“Once filmmakers have mastered that standard cinematic grammar, the greater challenge is learning how to move beyond it,” he said.
“If every film is told with the same rhythm, emotional structure and visual logic, cinema will gradually lose its ability to reflect the endless diversity of human life.”
Professor Nguyen Thi Lien Hang, Director of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and founder of Global Vietnam at Columbia University, also presented a paper titled Hollywood’s Global Century: What Vietnam Can Learn, Reinvent and Transform into Its Own Strength.
She outlined approaches that could help Vietnam strengthen its film industry as it becomes increasingly integrated into global cinema.
She noted that in 1933, when the original King Kong shattered box office records across French Indochina, Vietnam did not yet have a domestic film industry.
By the time Kong: Skull Island was filmed in Vietnam in 2016 and released in 2017, however, the country’s film sector had matured sufficiently to support the production of a major Hollywood blockbuster worth millions of dollars.
“In that same year, Vietnamese films generated higher domestic box office revenue than foreign productions for the first time, particularly in the folk horror and family comedy genres,” she said. “These are encouraging signs that Vietnam’s film industry is ready to take the next step and produce blockbuster films of its own.”
Dr. Ngo Phuong Lan, President of the Vietnam Association for the Promotion and Development of Cinema and Chair of DANAFF, concluded the seminar by highlighting several lessons Vietnam can learn from the US film industry.
These include effective storytelling, investment in human capital, respect for creativity, protection of intellectual property, technological innovation, building a profitable film industry, fostering collaboration, and adopting a global mindset.
She expressed confidence that policymakers could apply these lessons when designing more supportive regulatory frameworks for the industry, while filmmakers themselves would remain the driving force behind Vietnam’s cinematic development.
She also emphasized the important role of industry associations and film festivals.
Over successive editions, DANAFF has sought to strengthen the industry through initiatives such as Industry Days, which connect domestic and international film businesses, and DANAFF Talents, a program dedicated to discovering, training, and nurturing emerging filmmakers.
“With our current direction, we believe we are on the right path,” she said. “We hope to serve as a catalyst for the continued development of Vietnamese and Asian cinema, bringing both closer to the international stage.”
Tuan Chieu
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