A Noble Films and National Film Board of Canada co-production

A photograph can never capture the whole truth; but for two families on a collision course with history, one iconic image will reveal their deepest wartime secrets.

Short Synopsis

Which is more final, the gun or the camera? Armed with a powerful visual style, Oscar^®-nominated filmmaker Kim Nguyen reveals the elusive connection between two families and one iconic photo: Saigon Execution. Part history, part mystery, Saigon Story confronts the family secrets left in the wake of the Vietnam War, exposing the resilience of survivors and the blurred legacy of wartime memory.

Long synopsis

A woman in Washington state conceals the scars of a brutal family secret. A veteran journalist in Saigon helps two siblings solve a painful wartime mystery. And a photo becomes so iconic that it takes on a life of its own.

Spanning decades and continents, these remarkable accounts collide in Oscar^®-nominated filmmaker Kim Nguyen’s Saigon Story: Two Shootings in the Forest Kingdom. Armed with a powerful visual style, Nguyen reveals the intimate connection between two families and Eddie Adams’ Saigon Execution—an image that forever changed the world’s perception of the Vietnam War.

Shining a light on the long and sometimes surprising road to healing, Nguyen carefully uncovers the hidden truths of war, family and photography itself. What ultimately emerges is a kaleidoscope of humanity, one exploding with beauty, pain and the complex patterns of wartime memories.

In Saigon, in 2024, a son and daughter set out to free the soul of their father, which has been trapped in limbo for over 50 years. On the other side of the planet, a woman seeks to understand why her ex-husband tried to kill her five decades ago. Connecting the two is a photograph that changed history forever.

I was immediately, viscerally drawn to this project. There is something intensely moving about the two main stories we decided to focus on—how the extraordinary collides with the ordinary, and the way in which people navigate trauma and find ways to thrive and move on.

Over the last couple of years, I came to realize that I wish to create documentaries that capture unique worlds, characters and situations.  I also yearn to be witness to journeys of liberation from burdens past. In this documentary, we had the extraordinary chance of capturing a profound spiritual healing that was 56 years in the making!

As a Canadian of Vietnamese descent (my father is Vietnamese, my mother Canadian), the project speaks to me on many levels. I grew up hearing stories about the war, about the hardships of exile, the scars that heal but don’t go away. Saigon Story is a way for me to delve into that material, to try and understand and come to grips with it. How the psyches of Vietnamese people have been affected by war and exile, how they have overcome it and built new lives for themselves, how the wounds of the past still haunt them. One of the biggest gifts this project gave me was to discover just how effervescent Vietnamese culture is today, how people—especially the youth and the elders—still have immense physical proximity with each other, far from our growing solitudes of North America.

At the core of this film, I think I wanted to shine light on just how much our lives are built by chance collisions between our personal journeys and overarching moments in history. The film matches this randomness of life in some way: it is in no way a Ken Burns, all-encompassing documentary (I have enormous respect for Ken Burns). I would say it is more like me walking alongside an old and beautiful cathedral with my camera, then discovering a few of those unique, hidden gargoyles that tell a unique story, and filming them in front of this monumental historical set piece that acts as a backdrop to those personal stories that were, in part, chance encounters.