Flowing Home (Như một dòng sông)
2021 · 15m · Canada
Directed by Sandra Desmazières
Genres: drama, family, historical
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Sisters Thao and Sao Maï grow up in Vietnam, then are separated when Thao leaves after the fall of Saigon in 1975 while Sao Maï stays with their parents. Their letters sustain them through nearly twenty years apart, filled with daily life, memories, and ghosts of war.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects a war-separation story to hit you with trauma and reunion catharsis—Desmazières refuses both, letting the letters do something weirder and more honest, which is just... stay broken together, across distance, for two decades.
The epistolary form situates this firmly in a lineage of letter-based cinema (Chungking Express, 24 City), but Desmazières treats the correspondence as genuine formal architecture—each letter is a cut, a tense, a held moment—making the separation itself the film's compositional principle rather than its tragedy.
The decision to let the sisters' voices read their own letters unseen, layered over montage of daily Vietnamese life, transforms what could be maudlin into something almost unbearably intimate—it's the choice to *not* show faces that makes every word land.