The Montreal-born director of Saigon Story: Two Shootings in the Forest Kingdom has captured one of the DOXA Documentary Film Festival’s top honours. Kim Nguyen received the Colin Low Award for Best Canadian Director for his penetrating look at the back story behind a famous war photo during the Vietnam War.
In 1968 at the end of the Tet Offensive, U.S. photojournalist Eddie Adams snapped an image of a South Vietnamese brigadier general shooting a Viet Cong prisoner in the street.
Co-produced by Noble Films and the National Film Board of Canada, Saigon Story explores the impact of this public execution more than 50 years later on two families, one in Vietnam and the other in North America. In addition, the film addresses the importance of Vietnamese Buddhist transcendence ceremonies.
“The documentary bridges two seemingly disconnected narratives that gain profound depth as they unfold,” concluded jurors Damien Eagle Bear, Olivia Norquay, and Anaïs Elboujdaïni. “Furthermore, the director offers an original critique of the ethics surrounding war imagery—interrogating both what is captured on film and what remains hidden. The documentary carries a haunting resonance today, illustrating how contemporary conflicts sow seeds of unimaginable consequence for generations to come.”
The Colin Low Award is presented by DOC Northwest and CFMDC. Nguyen’s win came less than a week after Saigon Story won the Best Canadian Feature Documentary at the Hot Docs festival in Toronto. His 2012 film, Rebelle (War Witch), was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.
Meanwhile, the Vancouver Film Studios Award for Best BC Director went to t̓agəm Eileen Francis and ƛɛsla Dr. Evan Adams. They co-directed əm kʷaθ nan Namesake, which explains why the Tla’amin people on the Sunshine Coast want a new name for the city of Powell River. According to the jurors—Eagle Bear, Norquay, and Elboujdaïni—the co-directors “captured a necessary and meaningful conversation, confronting the past and current residential school denialism”.
Moreover, Francis and Adams also “documented the ongoing hard work of communal healing from the legacy of Residential Schools and give hope that Canada can address historical atrocities”.
DOXA honours film about swimmers
The DOXA Best Feature Documentary Award winner was And the Fly Fish Above Our Heads و الأسماك تطير فوق رؤوسنا , directed by Dima El-Horr. Jurors Julie Le Hegarat, Milena Salazar, and Sean Stiller stated: “As El-Horr follows men who swim every day along the Mediterranean coastline of Beirut, haunted by the lingering ghost of war, we experience the melancholy and repetition of this daily ritual. Attuned both to the rhythms of daily life and the larger political and historical forces surrounding them, the film creates an intimate and honest portrait of lives lived at the periphery of war.”
For the Short Documentary Award, jurors Bryan Sullivan, Hubert Sabino-Brunette, and Michael Toledano chose two winners: Intersecting Memory ذاكرة متقاطعة by Shayma’ Awawdeh and Tuktuit (Caribou) by Lindsay McIntyre. And Tanner Zurkoski’s Illustrated Legacies: Graveyard of the Pacific captured the Nigel Moore Award for Youth Programming.
“This film seamlessly weaves animated storytelling with archival material and interviews, offering an informative and deeply engaging history of the North Pacific through an Indigenous lens,” stated jurors Mack Riddell, Olivia Moore, and Emily Ash Cutajar. “It stands as a powerful continuation of oral traditions and knowledge-keeping practices, beautifully supplemented through animation. The film’s local setting resonated with us jurors, capturing Coast Salish territory through sweeping cinematography. By challenging colonial perspectives of early encounters, the film highlights Indigenous reclamation and survival in a way that will strongly connect with youth audiences.”
Special mentions went to:
- director Jean-François Caissy for Kindergarten (Colin Low Award);
- director Morgan Tams for Green Valley (Vancouver Film Studios Award for BC Director);
- Ça reste entre nous, directed by Maryam Shapoorian (DOXA Best Feature Documentary Award);
- Replica, directed by Chouwa Liang (Nigel Moore Award for Youth Programming).
The DOXA Documentary Film Festival closes at 8:30 p.m. on Sunday (May 10) with a screening of The Latest News from Deseret at the Cinematheque.
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