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Every three months, DVAN features the work of a different Vietnamese artist, one who is either working in the diaspora or who has returned to Viet Nam. This quarter, our featured artist is Doan Hoang.



Doan Hoang, director of Oh, Saigon (Photo by Mimi Nguyen)

Hoang Nien Thuc Doan [Doan Hoang] is best known for her film Oh, Saigon, which chronicles her family's struggles in revisiting the memories of war and the loss of home. She is an award- winning producer, director, and script writer. Hoang also heads her own production company, Nuoc Pictures.



Hoang's parents Nam and Anne before Saigon fell to North Vietnamese forces.

She was born in Nha Trang, Vietnam. Her father was a major in the South Vietnamese Air Force and her mother was a Mekong Delta socialite. Raised in Kentucky, Hoang is a graduate of Smith College. She has worked as an editor and writer for national magazines such as Details, House & Garden, Spin, and Saveur.



The Hoang family in Vietnam before the end of the civil war in 1975.

Hoang made her film Oh, Saigon over the course of seven years. The film won the Grand Jury Prize for Non-Fiction Feature Film at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival and the Best Feature Documentary & Best Brooklyn Film at the Brooklyn Arts Council International Film Festival. Oh, Saigon has been internationally screened in major cities in 10 countries, translated into five languages, and has had more than 150 air dates on PBS.



Nam Hoang reunites with his older brother Hai, who fought for the North, six decades after they last saw each other.

Some of Hoang's other film titles include Agent, Good Morning Captains, and A Requiem for Vegetables. She is currently making American Geisha, a documentary about her aunt, a former boat person who finds herself at the end of her long career as a high class call girl in San Francisco.

We sat down for an interview in Los Angeles on January 25, 2010. She was in town for a DVAN-sponsored screening of her film Oh, Saigon at the University of Southern California ( listen: ). For more information about the film, please go to the IVTS website.