Mai Huyền Chi is a Vietnamese writer-director whose films explore memory, displacement, and belonging. She approaches filmmaking as an act of care—working collaboratively with communities over years-long processes to create cinema that reclaims overlooked histories and voices.

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Her first short documentary, Down the Stream (2015), filmed with a floating stateless community near the Vietnam–Cambodia border, was a Vimeo Best of the Year finalist and screened at Winterthur.

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She co-wrote and co-directed the feature The Girl From Dak Lak (2022), about the lives of migrant workers in Ho Chi Minh City, which premiered internationally and was nominated for the Silvestre Award at IndieLisboa.

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Her short fiction debut The River Runs Still (2024), which returns to the theme of statelessness, was selected for the New York Asian Film Festival.

Her latest documentary, 50 Years of Forgetting (2025), commissioned by Al Jazeera, examines the act of remembering and forgetting the legacy of the Vietnamese-American War.

Following this, she initiated the anthology On Forgetting, gathering Vietnamese and diasporic voices exploring acts of remembering and forgetting Vietnam. 

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Chi is the founder of Cinema CNN (Cinema of Peasants), a grassroots screening program fostering independent cinema and critical dialogue in Vietnam.

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She is now developing her debut fiction feature The River Knows Our Names, about stateless families navigating life and ecological collapse along the Mekong. The project won the 2024 Talents Tokyo Award and received Next Masters Support.