Doan Hoang (b. Nha Trang, Vietnam; née Hoàng Nien Thuc-Đoan) is an award-winning New York-based Vietnamese-American documentary film director, producer, and screenwriter. Ms. Hoang made the successful 2007 PBS documentary "Oh, Saigon" about her family after leaving Vietnam on the last helicopter as Saigon fell. As the Hoang family escaped, they left her older sister, Van.
She said of this all, that “If I could put my finger on the day my family fell apart, it would be April 30, 1975”.[1]
Oh, Saigon tells how the Hoangs coped with this separation living in the United States. Twenty-five years later, Hoang, after growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, returned to Vietnam, finding her father, Nam, had two brothers he never mentioned: Hai, a communist who fought against him in the war for the northern side, and Dzung, a former ARVN who shot himself in hand to not have to fight against his Viet-Cong wife. Ms. Hoang arranges a reunion for her divided family to mixed results.
Ms. Hoang is the daughter of a former South Vietnamese Air Force major from Saigon and a Mekong Delta socialite. After Vietnam, she was raised in Kentucky, writing her first book on the Vietnam War when she was nine years old, and at the age of 13, making her first film documentary on war.
Ms. Hoang is a graduate of Smith College and worked as an editor and writer for national magazines, including Details, House & Garden, Spin and Saveur.
Hoang won the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival's Grand Jury Prize in 2008, and won Best Film and Best Documentary at the 42nd Brooklyn Art Council International Film Festival. Oh, Saigon's world premiere was in San Francisco in 2007, and New York premiere was at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Hoang took the film to 15 countries, including a tour of Spain in 2011 for the US State Department and American Documentary Showcase.
In 2009, she appeared on Little Saigon TV and was radio interviewed on NPR's New America Now on KUCI Radio.
Some of her other films include "Agent", "Good Morning Captains" and "A Requiem".
Hoang heads up her own film production company, Nuoc Pictures and is working on a follow-up to Oh, Saigon about the women in her family.