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THE RIVER KNOWS OUR NAMES

(in development)

fiction

2026

90'

Writer/ Director: Mai Huyền Chi

Producers: John Badalu & Thy Nguyễn

SEA Feature Lab, Singaporean International Film Festival,

Runner Up – SEA Pitch, Bangkok ASEAN Film Festival,

The River Award, Hanoi Winter Film Residency,

Locarno Open Doors, 

Udine Far East Award, Hongkong Film Financing Forum,

Focus Asia Project Market, Far East Film Festival,
2021
2021
2021
2021
2020
2020

​Director's Statement >>

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MAI HUYỀN CHI



​I grew up by the sea. Every morning in the summer, my father would take us to the beach on a Honda Dream, me sitting on his lap at the front on his lap and my big sister on my mother’s lap in the back seat. Waves licking skin, white foam bubbling on fingertips, sand sticking to hair, sun glistening, and so much laughter. Those were our happy years.


But once, I nearly died when I walked into a blue hole. I learned that the water didn’t just give joy and love; it could take and swallow you.


I have a love-hate relationship with water. I can sit all day looking at the ripples and the glistens of the water, but I never trust it. It fascinates me, and it scares me. There’s the nostalgia, too.


The happy years did not last long. Ours ended in the early 1990s, a few years after Vietnam opened its borders. What followed was a powerful tide of changes that cast people helter-skelter. It tore my parents’ marriage apart. Having lost his job, my father came home later and later. My mother could not speak a sentence to him without bitterly mentioning the bills. When they hurled hurtful words at each other, I thought of the sea. Under the water, there’d be Quiet. There’d be Peace. There, Chaos would not be able to reach and cause hurt.


In the subsequent years, while my extroverted sister found her world outside the doors, I spent my time hoping to fix my parents’ marriage. Once, I rode my bicycle in the rain to buy my mother a birthday cake, stole candles from the altar for the dead, stole a rose from a store, and called and begged my father to come home. Other times, I wrote letters and slipped them into my father’s pockets. We never discussed these. I don’t think Mother knew the cakes were not from Father, nor did my father tell anyone he’d found my handwritten letters in his pocket. At eighteen, I left town and everyone in it. They were still arguing over nothing and everything.




That is why I place a little girl as the hero of this story. I could not do what I hoped Little, the girl in this film, would be able to do. I’d place my faith any day in the power of a child’s capacity for joy, wonder, and love to bring light to the darkest and warmth to the coldest of our days.


Little is a child of an undocumented family living on the Mekong. She is the fictionalised amalgamation of the children I met in 2014 in Long Xuyen, just hours from the Vietnam-Cambodia border. Born to parents rendered stateless by regional conflicts from the 1970s, these children had no legal papers, address, or full name. It took me a while to realize it also meant no rights to social benefits, no legal protection, and no place to belong. But they were dazzling, hilarious, brave, generous, and wise beyond their years.


​The encounter with the stateless community on the Mekong led to my first film work, the short documentary DOWN THE STREAM, which became a finalist for Vimeo’s Best of the Year in 2015.


​When we screened the film on one of the houseboats, dozens of families rowed their boats over. What would forever stay in my heart was when Biên, a stuttering boy in the short, saw himself on the screen, his eyes widened, and he gasped,

“That’s me!”


That was one of the defining moments shaping my philosophy and intentions in making films and creating art. Apart from transcending us to unfamiliar realms of our mental and emotional landscapes, art has the power to heal, help, and provoke changes.


In a subsequent social project to record data about this community, we encountered a profound and heartbreaking reality. Many of the people here had no recollection of their names. Scratching her head in confusion, one lady admitted, “I don’t remember. I never used it.”


These humans and these moments inspire many humans and moments in this “The River Knows Our Names” film project.

People from this community have become my friends for the past decade. The children have grown up, and some adults have passed. I have attended their funerals and weddings. To better understand their lives, I have visited other stateless families up the stream in Tonle Sap, Cambodia. The people remain invisible and nameless in the eyes of the law, but many lives have been lived. And for that, I want this to be my feature-length debut: a celebration of human lives, stateless or not.


​On an intellectual level, this film tackles complex questions about identity, history, politics, and the state of our world. It challenges us to reflect on our shared humanity and the structures that render some invisible. But beyond the intellectual, this film is for Biên and others like him, for when they could look at the film projector’s light hitting the screen, see the pictures, and gasp:

“That’s me!”

And maybe for me, too, to see Little on the screen, living with joy, mischievousness, and courage, and know that it’s also me.



To prepare for this feature-length film, I made a short film entitled THE RIVER RUNS STILL to explore and test different matters, from artistic decisions to practical issues. During this process, what became a non-negotiable point for me was that the film must include the members of the stateless community whenever it can. The short made hundreds and thousands of people linger their eyes on Tha and Lon, my friends from the community, who would usually be overlooked. It made the audience listen to their real (unscripted) words. It listed their names in the credits, which would not have been written anywhere.


I am devoted to a process in which we give space and time to people who otherwise would not have them. In the end, with this movie, I hope to plant seeds for joy and empathy and for the millions of migrants, refugees, stateless and nameless people to be seen with all their complexities, humanities, and nuances. Thereupon, there will hopefully be changes in policymakers' hearts, minds, and decisions, either in Vietnam, Cambodia, or elsewhere, so that people like Little, Tha, Lua, and Bien will be seen and cared for by the law.






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