Cameraman Nguyen The Doan (first right) pictured with late President Ho (third right).

Born in 1911 into an intellectual Confucian family in Tan My Commune in An Giang Province, Nguyen Van Nghiep (his birth name) became one of the first to shoot film in the southern Vietnamese battlefields in the 1940s.

During the war, he set up a studio to develop film, and showed films to people who lived in liberated areas.

At the age of 19, Doan was admitted to the Vietnamese Communist Party in Phnom Penh, Cambodia in 1930.

Doan filmed the late President Ho Chi Minh when he lived near the president. He was also the cameraman for the Second Party Congress in 1951.

Nguyen The Doan was awarded the Independence Medal Second Class in January of this year. He will be buried with full honours at the city’s cemetery.

VietNamNet/VNS