Tony Bui has taken special care to bring you this interview. The film director, screenwriter and producer was caught in one of China’s recent downpours of biblical proportions and found himself lost in an unfamiliar, chaotic Beijing.

“This is my first time here,” he says via Zoom, almost two hours after our scheduled appointment, “and unfortunately I don’t speak the language. I was stuck: I got on the wrong bus, got off the bus, got soaked – my shoes, socks, everything.”

“I tried to get a taxi, but I couldn’t get one and couldn’t call a taxi either: Didi, the service in Beijing, is not that efficient. And with the storm, no car came anyway. So I asked a shopkeeper who showed me the way to the subway. But the subway was insanely crowded because everyone was trying to take it. So I couldn’t even get on…”

“We had a huge crowd and they showed my film. Full house, beautiful venue,” he says.

As we speak, Bui is concluding a series of visits to regional cities, including Hong Kong, organized by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University in New York, where he is an artist in residence.

The film in question is Three Seasons (1999), which the 50-year-old Bui, born in Ho Chi Minh City, which he still calls Saigon, describes as an assessment of the “westernization of Vietnam after America and Vietnam renewed their relations.” Set in the late 1990s, the film stars Harvey Keitel. It was his feature debut and won the Grand Jury Prize, Audience Award and Best Cinematography at the Sundance Film Festival. In the quarter century since, he says, his hometown has radically changed again.

“Without a doubt,” he says. “Saigon is unrecognisable today, not even compared to ten years ago. It’s a completely different city. In my film there are all these huge billboards (on the Saigon River), Maxell, Coca-Cola and all that stuff. That’s the backdrop. Now there are billboards everywhere and huge hotels. But it’s not just the West: there are influences from Korea, Japan, Taiwan and China.”

Bui’s tour began in what was then North Vietnam.

“I started in Hanoi with three of the best filmmakers,” he says, “then I went to Saigon and gave a lecture with five more. But then I went from Saigon to New York because Three Seasons was going to be shown at Lincoln Center. So I flew back there, showed my film, and then flew to Singapore to continue the tour and talk to the filmmakers Anthony Chen, Nicole Midori Woodford and Jeremy Chua. And from Singapore I moderated the conversation in Hong Kong.”

Bui is excited about the reappearance of Three Seasons in a new format – not least because it almost didn’t happen. “It’s great that there’s renewed interest in the film, which was recently restored in (high-resolution) 4K. It looks fantastic.”

“Sundance celebrated its 40th anniversary in January this year – and Three Seasons was chosen to be part of the ceremonial presentation. It was a great honor. But I didn’t have a digital version, it only existed on celluloid. So I had to desperately find a way to restore it,” he says. “I hadn’t seen it for 15 years and didn’t know where the negative was. We called the lab – and they had lost it. After about six weeks, it was found, we found the sound element and were finished a week before Sundance started.”

Although he grew up in Sunnyvale and Palo Alto, California, from the age of two, his homeland dominates much of Bui’s work. His first film, the successful 1995 short film, Yellow Lotusfilmed in Vietnam, was the precursor to Three Seasons. Until 2001 and the feature film Green Dragonwritten by Bui and directed by his older brother Timothy Linh Bui, he worked with Forest Whitaker and Patrick Swayze.

“Green Dragon “It’s loosely based on our family coming to America through the Vietnamese refugee camps,” he says. “We were flown out during the fall of Saigon. We were on Guam for a few days and then ended up in Fort Chaffee, Arkansas. We were definitely lucky.”

And Bui has turned to Vietnam again for his upcoming, potentially shocking next project, based on the horrific 1972 war photograph known as the “Napalm Girl.”

“Everyone knows the picture,” says Bui, “but when I met photographer Nick Ut, I asked him what he thought happened that day. He started telling me the story and I realized that an incredible film was being made.”

“Getting the rights from him was the trigger. Then I contacted Kim Phuc, the little girl in the photo, and she liked the idea I had in mind.

“My film covers the 24 hours after the photo was taken – it’s a surprise, something nobody knows about. The photo is the hook, but the film is actually about something much more.”