| About The Director |
|
Tiana (Thi Thanh Nga) is a photographer and filmmaker originally from Saigon. She is the writer producer director of the award-winning documentary From Hollywood to Hanoi (1993) and is a co-founder of the not-for-profit organization Indochina Film Arts Foundation (IFAF) with Oliver Stone. Tiana is based in LA, NY, Bangkok and Hanoi.
Raised in Saigon, during the escalation of the Vietnam War, Tiana witnessed the conflict firsthand and these impressions would later grow to shape much of her work as an artist. Tiana's father, Patrick Du Phuoc Long, was Director of Information and her uncle was the Minister of Defense, both for South Vietnam. With her family directly involved in the political arena that shaped the politics of this era, Tiana had an inside view of what was happening to the land of her birth. In 1966, she and her family immigrated to the United States following the fall of the South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. In Wash DC Tiana met Bruce Lee through Jhoon Rhee. Bruce brought her out to a karate tournament in Long Beach and introduced her to screenwriter producer Stirling Silliphant, who became her husband. She released a How To Karatecize martial arts video (long before Tae Bo) and starred in a number of films and TV movies including Sam Peckinpah's The Killer Elite with Robert Duval and James Caan and the ABC/Warner Bros. miniseries Pearl with Robert Wagner and Angie Dickinson. Tiana was the female lead in Joel Silberg's action thriller Catch the Heat, co-starring Rod Steiger, in which she was able to play a female Bruce Lee undercover DEA agent. She used her abilities both as an actress and as a skilled martial artist at a time when Hollywood did not know what a Shuriken or Ninja was, never mind a Nanchuk! Crouching Tiger was hidden, and still a long way off ... In 1987, Tiana returned to Vietnam for the first time in 24 years in order to reconnect with her roots and form a new bond with a changing, growing Vietnam. Seeking to reconcile her "American self" with her Vietnamese one, Tiana travelled extensively over the next several years interviewing and documenting the country and its people through photography, film and video. The result of these explorations was culminated in her critically-acclaimed film From Hollywood to Hanoi, executive produced by Oliver Stone. This film has been screened at The White House, on Capitol Hill and is used as educational material at top universities and continues to be relevant in the discourse on American-Vietnamese relations. The follow-up film, currently titled Nobody Somebody Everybody, is scheduled for completion after she performs in her one woman musical comedy YELLOW FEVER...THERE IS NO CURE. Tiana is currently making collage art pieces for a traveling exhibition to tour with her play. Tiana's work, involving thousands of original photos and hundreds of hours of footage, continues to pursue issues of cultural identity, communication and exchange between Southeast Asia and the United States. Tiana documents original and valuable insights into a number of subjects relating to politics and historical dialogue through her use of personal stories. |