Interview by Paul Salfen
SYNOPSIS: There’s terror in paradise when Jaelyn (Alicia Silverstone) and Kyle (James Tupper) arrive at a remote seaside villa in Vietnam for a romantic getaway. A torrential storm descends, reducing the villa to little more than a raft and sweeping the young couple out to sea. Suddenly, another danger appears: a school of great white sharks. With her injured husband watching helplessly, Jaelyn must battle the deadly predators alone in this tense thriller that rides an unrelenting wave of fear.
Le-Van Kiet is a Vietnamese-born filmmaker who wrote and directed Furie, a martial-arts crime thriller. Furie was selected as the Vietnamese entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 92nd Academy Awards and broke the record for highest-grossing Vietnamese film in history.
Kiet’s debut film Dust of Life (2006) is coming-of-age drama incorporating an episode from his own personal life – the exodus of Vietnamese boat people in the 1970s and 1980s. Since then, drama and thriller have taken turns in his work. His horror film House in the Alley (2012) was a great success in Vietnam and his film Gentle (2014), based on a short story by Fyodor Dostoevsky, had its premiere in Busan International Film Festival. Kiet is a graduate of UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television.
