Documentary awards campaigns usually lean on critics and festival juries. Y Vân: The Lost Sounds of Saigon is running on something closer to word of mouth: a film that has drawn large crowds and sold-out shows among Vietnamese communities, with kids, teens, parents and grandparents watching side by side, now has a nonfiction studio behind its push for Oscar recognition. XTR, the global nonfiction entertainment studio, has come on board, and its founders are joining as executive producers.

The film follows co-director Khoa Hà as she sets out to recover the lost recordings of her late grandfather, the Vietnamese composer Y Vân, whom the film nicknames “The Quincy Jones of Saigon.” As Deadline first reported, the deal lands just after the documentary, which she co-directed with Victor Velle, won the Audience Award at the New Orleans Film Festival over the weekend. That is one more audience prize for a run built largely on them.

According to the production’s release, Y Vân was one of the most prolific and famous composers in Vietnam during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, but by the end of the war most of his original recordings had been lost or destroyed. The film tells that search through a blend of vérité filmmaking, archival discoveries and poetic animation, tracing it “across generations, continents, and the history of Vietnam,” in the words of its synopsis.

XTR founders Bryn Mooser and Justin Lacob now join the project. Mooser, a two-time Academy Award nominee for Lifeboat and Body Team 12, calls it “entertaining, visually stunning, and full of adventure. A profoundly important film for Vietnamese-Americans and the world at large, reminding us that love, family, and music can heal the wounds of war.”

The festival record XTR is inheriting is broad. Y Vân: The Lost Sounds of Saigon premiered in competition at DOC NYC in 2025 and was named to that festival’s Top 10 Most Popular Films. It took the Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary Feature at the Atlanta Film Festival and Best Feature Film at the Viet Film Festival. At the San Luis Obispo International Film Festival it won two audience prizes, for Best Documentary Feature and Best of Festival. The film is a production of The Pink Cloud, produced by Douglas Emerson.

The documentary is set for a theatrical release in early 2027. To go with it, the team will release Y Vân’s newly recovered, restored and remastered original recordings as exclusive vinyl pressings.

So the campaign’s final move turns the film’s premise around: the music whose original recordings did not survive the end of the war is headed back onto vinyl, pressed to arrive alongside the documentary that went looking for it.

Tags: documentary, awards-season, Bryn Mooser, Khoa Hà, XTR, Y Vân: The Lost Sounds of Saigon