Van Vu

Writer – Director

Van is the son of a Vietnamese father and a Chinese mother, both refugees from the war that came to start a life in the US. He grew up in a wooded town on a lake outside of Seattle. As a youth, he was only allowed to watch the television once a week, which he partially attributes to his obsession with cinema.

During college, he studied politics, philosophy, and economics, and on his free time he shot several experimental shorts and worked on music and photography. Over the winter and summer months, he traveled through Asia, Europe, and South America. In 2005 at the height of the economic boom, he moved to New York to join Merrill Lynch and worked eighty to a hundred hours a week as an investment banker advising on multi-billion corporate mergers and acquisitions and financings deals. On the nights that he would get off work before midnight, he immersed himself in films.

Several months before the Great Recession began in 2007, he decided to quit finance to make his first narrative film. Over the course of a year he developed the script, preproduction began in the spring of 2008, and Yes, Yesterday was shot over a week at the end of summer. After an entire year of editing, the film was finished in the autumn of 2009.

Van currently lives in Brooklyn, NY and is actively working on his next film project.