Hit French drama to debut

Born to a Vietnamese mother and a father from Algeria, the 35-year-old director says that she was always aware of her immigrant identity while growing up. Her family fled Saigon, which was renamed as Ho Chi Minh City, in 1956. Forty years later, a teenage Nguyen visited the Vietnamese capital with her mother for the first time. She still remembers how opinion from her family members about whether to return was divided.

"Some of my aunts and uncles never wanted to go back, while others longed to end their days there," says Nguyen, who studied sociology in university before enrolling in the drama school of the National Theatre of Strasbourg in 2005.

"When I live in France, I go to Vietnamese restaurants and my mother speaks Vietnamese at home. I consider myself Vietnamese. But when I visited Ho Chi Minh City, I felt foreign to the place. Even my mother, who bargained with some fruit sellers in a market, was questioned about her accent. Her Vietnamese is no longer used today," she adds.

Inspired by her family history, the director spent over two years doing research for Saigon, meeting people to collect stories and developing scenes in both Paris and Vietnam.

"I wanted to look at people whose fates have been decided by those special years, to see what it did to them physically and spiritually," Nguyen says.