Veteran film director lambastes Vietnamese film industry By Hien Huong | dtinews.vn   Director Dang Nhat Minh, a well-respected 56-year veteran of the film industry, has come out with a scathing critique of the top-down style management in the movie industry in Vietnam. Director, People’s Artist Dang Nhat Minh Minh, no new-comer to the art, has earned the title of People’s Artist, and in an interview with DTiNews, he did not hold back his dissatisfaction of the way the domestic movie industry is run, focusing especially on what he sees as weaknesses in the official strategy to develop cinema thorough 2020 with a vision for further development through 2030. The largest shortcomings for Vietnamese film, he said, are not a lack of equipment or facilities, but a scarcity of qualified technicians. “What we should be doing if we are serious about fostering a vibrant movie industry is to focus on investment in skills and human resources. This is what will bring around benefits in the long-term,” he said. He draws a line between the past and the digital age, saying that the government's role in film industry should also include television. The reason, he says, is that television has already received government funding which has been used to build studios and purchase up-to-date equipment. So cooperation between the two sectors could produce mutual benefits while cutting expenses. Television industry has acquired advanced film making technologies "The old way of thinking has separated television from film productions. But, in this new digital age, the same technologies used in television can also be used in cinema," he noted. Minh said that his skepticism concerning the practical benefits of strategy embodied by the draft legislation of the state has foundation in both past and current trends. According to him,the thinking behind the strategy to develop Vietnam's film industry into the best in Southeast Asia is arcane and not feasible. He points to the failures of recent major productions, siting the discrepancy between the amount of investment versus the return as examples. "I've been working in this industry for 56 years now, and have experienced the ups and downs of official reform efforts. Many of them were actually wasteful and detrimental to the art. This is the reason I have doubts about any new plans," he stated. Several cinema directors have moved to work for TV films When he served as a deputy of the 10th National Assembly there he called for more investment in the country' film industry, calling the attempt to popularise digital and video films at the expense of celluloid careless. He added that the decision to establish the Vietnam Cinema Technology Centre at the time was both wasteful and ineffective. “The entire project has run up a price tag of hundreds of billions dong, most of which have not even been used. Valuable equipment sits idle because there is a serious lack of people who have the training and experience to operate it," he added. Switch to market-based cinema? While profits from the film industry in Vietnam have increased from USD2 million in the year 2000 to an estimated USD50 million this year, the director insisted that most of the money is going straight into the pockets of foreign film producers and the coffers of private studios who hold control over distribution because they own large cinema chains. Current inefficient film industry management policies profiting foreign and local private film makers "We have the inefficient state-based system of management over the film industry to blame," he said. "The result is bad for government-funded films and the industry in general," he assessed. The veteran film director's recipe for improving the situation is that the government change its policy so that different tax rates are applied to different types of films, with higher rates applied to movies in the foreign and entertainment categories. This, he said, will have a positive effect on the fledgling domestic movie industry, and encourage the production of more art films.