Doan Hoang (born in Nha Trang, Vietnam), is a Vietnamese-American documentary film director, producer, and screenwriter. She produced the 2007 documentary Oh, Saigon about her family after leaving Vietnam on the last civilian helicopter as Saigon fell. The documentary won several awards at film festivals and also broadcast on PBS, and she was selected to be a delegate to Vietnam for the American Documentary Showcase.

Biography

Hoang is the daughter of a former South Vietnamese Air Force major from Saigon and a Mekong Delta socialite. On April 30, 1975, she was airlifted on the final civilian helicopter out of Vietnam at the end of the war. She was placed in a refugee camp at Fort Chaffee in Arkansas. Four months afterwards, she settled in Louisville, Kentucky. When she was nine, she wrote her first book on the Vietnam War. Around the age of 12-13, she made a film documentary on war. She graduated from Seneca High School in 1990, and Smith College in 1994.

After college, she worked as an editor and writer for national magazines, including Details, Saveur, House & Garden, Garden Design, and Spin.

Hoang developed the film Oh, Saigon over seven years, where she documented her family. In 2005, the Sundance Institute awarded Hoang a grant for the then titled Homeland. She also received funding from the Independent Television Service (ITVS), the Center for Asian American Media, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Hoang premiered Oh, Saigon in March 2007 at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival and received a nomination for Best Documentary. She had her New York premiere at the Museum of Modern Art in 2008. At the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, her film received the Grand Jury Prize. It won the Best Film and Best Feature Documentary at the 42nd Brooklyn Arts Council International Film Festival in 2008. It also screened at the Vietnam International Film Festival.

Hoang took the film to 16 countries, including a tour of Spain in 2011 and 2012 tour of Vietnam for the US State Department and American Documentary Showcase. She was invited back to Vietnam by the United Nations Vietnam delegation in September 2012 as an American delegate.

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 tentatively called Scars for Eyes. Hoang divides her time between New York, Los Angeles, Ho Chi Minh City and Louisville, Kentucky. Some of her other films include Agent, Good Morning Captains, A Requiem for Vegetables, and American Geisha. She is also writing a screenplay called Love London, based on her marriage to an English aristocrat, and a comedy called Danger Man