| Title | August Letters |
|---|---|
| Director | Mai Huyền Chi (Chi Mai) & Xuan Ha |
| Country | Vietnam |
| Year of Production | 2021 |
| VDP Selection Year | Death/Life-2021 |
| Screen Time | 26min |
| Language | Vietnamese |
| Subtitles | English/Japanese |
| Tags | Covid-19 Pandemic, Loss, Family, Artist, Memories |
Overview
The call for submissions to the VDP arrived in August — a month marked by both mourning and celebration, as filmmaker Chi recalled the grief of her father’s death anniversary and celebrated the joy of her nephew’s birthday. Amid the stillness of the pandemic lockdown, she wrote and invited her dear friend, artist Xuan Ha, to join her in reflecting on life and death through their shared language: cinema.
Exchanged across two cities as an epistolary cinematic montage, August Letters weaves together the private rituals and rhythms of their families. What unfolds is a meditation on love, grief, generational care, and the intimate politics of everyday life. Through observational fragments and correspondence, the documentary offers a tender portrait of contemporary Vietnam — where memory and kinship are held not just in words, but in gesture, presence, and image.
Mai Huyền Chi
Director
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 long periods to create cinema that reclaims overlooked histories and voices. Her debut short Down the Stream (2015), filmed with a stateless riverine community, was a Vimeo Best of the Year finalist. She co-directed The Girl From Dak Lak (2022), which premiered internationally and was nominated for IndieLisboa’s Silvestre Award. Her short fiction debut The River Runs Still (2024) screened at the New York Asian Film Festival, and her latest work, 50 Years of Forgetting (2025), was commissioned by Al Jazeera. She is currently developing her first fiction feature The River Knows Our Names, which follows stateless families living along the Mekong. The project received the Talents Tokyo Award and its Next Masters Support, amongst other international recognitions.
Xuân Hạ
Director
Xuân-Hạ is an art worker whose practice spans roles as an artist and organizer. Working across moving image, installation, and conceptual art, she translates personal and collective imaginaries into visual narratives. Her work creates discursive spaces that critically examine the fluidity of identity, the impermanence of place, and the fragility of cultural continuity amid social and environmental transformations.
Her works have been presented at international film festivals and exhibitions, including the Asian Avant-Garde Film Festival 2025 (M+ Museum, Hong Kong), Painting with Light Film Festival 2022 (National Gallery Singapore), the Kyoto University Visual Documentary Project (VDP) 2021, and Jakarta Biennale ESOK 2021 (Museum of National Awakening, Indonesia), as well as at various independent and institutional art spaces nationally and internationally. Alongside her artistic practice, Xuân-Hạ is deeply engaged in cultivating local art communities in Vietnam. She is a co-founder of Chaosdowntown Cháo (HCMC, 2015–2019) and the founder of A Sông (Da Nang, 2019–present). She has been awarded for the International Future Leaders Program 2022-23 by The Australia Council for the Arts, and recently received the Fellows Award: Cultural & Artistic Responses to the Environmental Crisis 2024 (CAREC) by Prince Claus Fund.
Interview with the Director
Why did you make this documentary?
How did you come to work on this theme?
August is the month in which every year, Chi’s father’s death is commemorated, and her nephew’s birthday celebrated. Falling back into intimate reflections, she invites Ha, a friend and a colleague, into a shared mental space in which the two artists “write” to each other as both are trapped in their rooms during Covid-lockdown on life and death. Together and apart, they go down their memory lanes and explore their respective family histories and stories.
Commentary from the Screening Committee Members
Kenji Ishizaka
Senior Programmer, International Film Festival(TIFF)/ Professor, Japan Institute of the Moving Image
This work is a correspondence between two female filmmakers through documentary. This is reminiscent of Japanese Renga poetry, and the variety of representational styles that follow are mesmerizing. The work is based on a tabletop family tree made of grains of rice and beans, which clearly shows family members: from the grandparents’ generation through to the present, using video, photographs, and a split screen format. The beans representing the deceased are covered with white powder as if they were coffins that were going to be buried. This is not just the practice of remote communication between artists divided by the Corona pandemic, but also one that express this year’s theme, “Death and Life,” and as such it has gone beyond being mere documentation and entered the realm of art. An excellent work!
Hiroyuki Yamamoto
Associate Professor, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University, Malaysian Area Studies/Media Studies
During the restriction of activities caused by COVID-19 in August 2021, two Vietnamese filmmakers, Ha and Chi, hear from their mothers about the “death and life” of their own families and exchange video letters about those stories to contemplate them. The stories of the two families progress, as they synchronize from time to time, narratives unfurl layered with diverse messages about death and life of their respective families, daily life and mourning in Vietnam under the pandemic, as well as how to build relationships free from family constraints.