Mai Huyên Chi
DirectorThy Trang
ProducerVietnam
CountryLogline
On the undocumented floating homes of the Mekong, a little girl's birthday wish tests how far love can reach when you don't officially exist.
Short Synopsis
Gam lives on a Mekong houseboat with her parents Lua and Bien, and their neighbor Tha. When a city boy introduces her to birthday parties, she longs for one of her own. Lua sells fish while Bien struggles at the sand mine, his undocumented status excluding him from wages. Their marriage strains as work that could fund Gam’s celebration erodes their home.
After a diving accident, Tha is relocated to a resettlement zone but returns for Gam’s party, hoping to reunite the family. When Tha drowns retrieving a gift, the community hesitates over burial customs, uncertain of her ethnicity, fearing spiritual consequences. Frustrated, Bien burns Tha’s houseboat as a dignified farewell. Grief silences Gam, until Lua and Bien prepare a second celebration to restore her joy, while the riverbank continues to collapse, reminding them that love must endure even when solid ground cannot.
Mai Huyền Chi
Mai Huyền Chi is a Vietnamese writer-director whose films explore memory, identity, and belonging, centering voices often left out of dominant narratives. She makes films and art as acts of care. Responding to a world marked by division and ecological crisis, her recent projects foster deeper human connections with land, water, and one another.
Her latest documentary 50 Years of Forgetting (Al Jazeera, 2025) garnered over 100K views in its first ten days. Her short fiction debut The River Runs Still was an official selection at the New York Asian Film Festival (2025). She is also the founder of Cinema CNN (Cinema of Peasants), a community film program fostering independent cinema in Vietnam. Chi is currently developing her debut fiction feature The River Knows Our Names, winner of the 2024 Talents Tokyo Award and Talents Tokyo’s Next Masters Support.
Thy Trang
hy Trang is a Vietnamese filmmaker and producer. Her work encompasses a wide range of projects, from video arts and experimental films to feature documentaries. In 2022, her first feature documentary project, "The Living Room War," received the IDFA's Bertha Development Fund and support from IDFA's Filmmaker Support Department (by attending workshops at IDFA Project Space and IDFAcademy), as well as AsiaDoc Lab (Docmonde). In 2024, Thy started to collaborate with director Mai Huyen Chi, producing her short film “Where Shall I Lay This Body”, the mid-length documentary "50 Years of Forgetting” and the feature-length “The River Knows Our Names”.