On Saturday, November 29th, at 5:40 p.m., the International Short Film Competition was held in Venue 2 of NTT CRED Hall. Among the participating international short filmmakers was director Mai Phuong Chi, who presented her film “The River Runs Still.”
The story follows a stateless woman living along Vietnam’s Mekong River who believes she has finally obtained the legal documents needed to begin a new life on land. Overjoyed, she gives away all her belongings—only to discover that the documents are invalid. Blending testimonies from stateless communities in the border regions between Vietnam and Cambodia with fiction, the film resonates deeply with hundreds of people across Asia who have no country to call their own.
Director Mai Phuong Chi is a Vietnamese-born screenwriter and filmmaker. She personally traveled to the Mekong River, conducted direct interviews with members of stateless communities, and invited them to appear in the film. Drawing attention to communities in her own country who lack identification papers, passports, or even official names, she created a work that focuses on their lived realities.
Regarding the film, she stated: “I intentionally avoided delivering a direct message. Instead, I want people to acknowledge the fact that nearly 20,000 stateless individuals exist in the world today. I don’t want audiences to feel pity as if they are different from us—rather, I want them to face this reality, imagine it, and truly feel it.”
The English title “The River Runs Still” carries two layers of meaning: the “still” as in “the river continues to flow,” and “still” as in “the stateless boat people are still there,” continuing to exist in the present.
Finally, the director shared a message: “Eighty years after the end of World War II and fifty years since the end of the Vietnam War, being invited to the Hiroshima International Film Festival at this particular moment feels profoundly meaningful.”
She is currently developing a feature-length film based on this work, focusing on a nine-year-old girl from the stateless community celebrating her first-ever birthday party.
