Tran Anh Hung

This resourceful young Vietnam-born, Parisian-bred filmmaker recreated an airy bourgeois home, set in 1951 Saigon, on a French soundstage for his debut feature "The Scent of Green Papaya" (1993). Opting for a cinema that boldly flaunts its artificiality, Tran told a simple but sensual fable of a young girl who comes to work as a servant for a well-to-do Vietnamese family. The papaya--eaten as a fruit when ripe, cooked as a vegetable when green--is a staple of the Vietnamese diet prepared by women of all social strata. Tran used this and other domestic rituals to draw parallels between the lives of his various female characters.