Đoan Hoàng (née Hoàng Niên Thục- Đoan, also known as Doan Hoang Curtis) is an award-winning director, producer, writer, and oral historian.  She directed and produced Oh, Saigon: A War in the Family, a documentary about her family’s dramatic escape via the last helicopter taking out civilians in the last moments of the Vietnam War, returning later to discover that her family had fought against each other. Đoan is currently directing and producing a follow-up film, Oh, America: Divided Country about her family’s second generation political split in America. She is a recipient of awards and grants from Firelight Media Spark Fund/National Endowment of the Humanities, Sundance Institute, Grand Jury Prize at LA Asian Pacific Film Festival, Center for Asian American Media, 42nd Brooklyn Arts Council International Film Festival (Best Film, Best Documentary), Austin Film Festival (Best of the Fest), Ms. Foundation and many more. Her work has screened and televised on five continents, featured in international museum exhibitions and festivals, and streamed on Netflix, Amazon and Hulu. Đoan has been a traveling artist for the U.S. Department of State in Vietnam and Spain. Đoan is also a trauma healing practitioner.

“What a gift. A master.”
BY BEST-SELLING AUTHOR ELIZABETH GILBERT
of Eat, Pray, Love; Coyote Ugly, Big Magic)

Ðoan Hoàng Curtis is an extraordinary and award-winning filmmaker. Her documentary OH SAIGON: A War in the Family tells the story of the last Vietnamese family to be airlifted during the fall of Saigon, in the last moments of the Vietnam War. That family happened to be her own. Though her older sister was left behind, Ðoan was on that helicopter as a three-year-old child, already deeply traumatized by a war that, for her family, has never really ended. After living in refugee camps and growing up in Kentucky, Ðoan returned to Vietnam as an adult and learned that her father had fought in the war against his own brother. Ðoan has spent her life attempting to understand and heal these wounds, and her art and activism speak to that desire for deep peace and compassion.

But she is not just an artist. Ðoan hears things, she sees things, she knows things. And she is not the only person I’ve ever met who was raised in war and violence who later became a mystic. I wonder sometimes if trauma is the shattering blow that opens us, in some way, to other worlds, to other times, to voices that only we can hear.

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Ms. Hoàng was born in the former Republic of (South) Vietnam to a South Vietnamese Air Force major from Saigon and a Mekong Delta socialite.  Raised in Kentucky, Hoang wrote her first book about her family’s escape during the Fall of Saigon at age 9; wrote, directed, co-produced and appeared in her first war documentary at the age of 12; and began her first oral history family genealogy at age 13.  

After graduating Smith College in Massachusetts in the mid-1990s, Ms. Hoàng spent years as a New York City editor, writer and fact checker, working for companies such as Conde Nast, Time Inc., American Express Publishing and Meigher Communications for national magazines such as Details, House & Garden, Spin, Travel & Leisure, and Saveur working on articles and books with diverse topics as politics, music, art, food and wine, gardening, fashion and culture as she continued her Vietnam War family oral history work. She was also a singer and lead guitarist in the short-lived riot grrrl band, Cheryl Tiegs, having been inspired by meeting the band Bikini Kill on several occasions as a teen.

In 1996, Ms. Hoàng was interviewed for V’s (formerly Eve Ensler’s) Vagina Monologues, becoming a subject in the play. In 1998, Ms. Hoàng joined V/ Ensler as an early co-founding board member of VDay, a non-profit which raise over $120 million dollars for grassroots anti-violence groups, rape crisis centers, domestic violence shelters, and safe houses, “shattering taboos and changing the way activists make change in their communities.” Ms. Hoang was involved with art and activist groups such as the Gorilla Girls, Bluestockings Bookstore and Franklin Furnace.

In 1998, while Ms. Hoang was living in London, she met then-cinematographer Ham Tran (director of Maika, Journey from the Fall) and artist Chris Sicat who were touring with the Vietnamese-American comedy troupe, Club o’ Noodles, beginning the documentary then called Nuoc/Country, then Homeland, then Oh, Saigon. In 1999, Ms. Hoang and Mr. Tran (who also became associate producer), traveled across the US and Vietnam to film the documentary. Ms. Hoàng returned to New York City to complete the project, adding John Battsek of Passion Pictures, Oscar and Emmy-winning producer to the project as co-producer and then executive producer. Julie Goldman and Cactus Three became executive producers, along with Frank Campbell. Brooklyn-based Su Kim was added as associate producer.

Oh, Saigon was a seven-year documentary project funded by (in order of involvement), the Sundance Institute, ITVS, the Center for Asian American Media, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, winning 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 42nd Brooklyn Arts Council International Film Festival, and was nominated fora number of awards at multiple film festivals appearing in dozens of international film festivals.

In 2008, Oh, Saigon had its Manhattan premiere in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)’s Documentary Fortnight Exhibition to a sold-out standing room only crowd, where curator William Sloan called the film “truly strong, human and brave.” Ms. Hoàng was a featured artist in Minneapolis’s Weisman Art Museum’s 2009 exhibition, Changing Identities: Recent Work of Women Artists from Vietnam, again with another sold-out standing room only audience.  

The film has been internationally screened and televised in major cities in multiple countries and 5 continents, translated into seven languages, and in the US, had 7 national airings on PBS alone, along with cable, video on demand, streaming on Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, Roku, TubiTV and IMDB-TV. Oh, Saigon is also available on SBS Australia from June 4, 2021 to April 30, 2024.

From 2010-2012, Ms. Hoàng toured both Spain and Vietnam with Oh, Saigon as a featured artist for the US Department of State. In 2021, Ms. Hoàng was featured alongside Yoko Ono on the BBC World Service’s Cultural Frontline: the Art of the Vietnam War, on NPR’s New America Now with author Andrew Lam interviewing, on EiTB in Spain,and many others.

Ms. Hoang has screened Oh, Saigon and spoken at dozens of international universities, colleges, and institutions. Oh, Saigon is taught in college and university courses internationally, a staple in many film, Asian American studies and social work courses, including Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen’s USC course on American literature and film, Vietnam War scholar, Marilyn B. Young’s NYU course on America’s wars, and Mare Diaz’s Quinnipiac University course on truth and journalism.

Some of Đoan’s other directing and producing credits include Agent, American Geisha, Legacy of Denial, Good Morning Captains, Hard Times, Nuoc, On the Trail of Ho & A Requiem. She has directed music videos and commercials, consulted on numerous award-winning and documentaries such as Marshall Curry and Sam Cullman’s Oscar-nominated If A Tree Falls, Adele Pham and Adele Ray’s Nailed It, and consults for Emmy-winning Oscar-nominated producer/director Chiemi Karasawa.

Đoan is currently making a follow-up to Oh, Saigon, called Oh America: Divided Country, about the second generation split in her family. She, her brother and cousin were child survivors of civil war and airlifting from the Fall of Saigon. Out of 3 children, one became a liberal and the other two children marched on the US Capitol on January 6. Hoàng has been working on an oral history project around the Fall of Saigon involving both Vietnamese and American survivors, including the veterans who rescued her family in the last airlift. Đoan directed, produced, and appeared in The Longest Walk (2024), a documentary short that takes place in Kentucky, part of a series by the Abortion Clinic Film Collective, shorts about abortion taking place in the states that have banned abortion.

Đoan

See Doan Hoang’s Curriculum Vitae

• Please note that currently, only Doan Hoang & Nuoc Pictures/Nuoc Productions, own any and all rights to publicly screen, lease, sell or license Oh, Saigon, the documentary film. (Some institutions such as universities and colleges are license to show the film for free classes under 50 and for their library borrowing but do not have additional public screenings rights.
  
  * Note: ONLY Juan Buccella (no quiero) and Bret Sigler have received permission
  to show previews of OH, SAIGON on YouTube.)

• All other screenings, digital displays on any platform, ads made from, leasing,

  selling, or licensing, please contact Nuoc Productions for permissions at info(@)ohsaigon.com.
  

• Website design by Nick Livolsi (nick_livolsi (@)me.com) and Doan Hoang