THE RIVER THAT HOLDS OUR HANDS (ONG6 A7 ONG6)
DIRECTOR: Jianhang Chen
85 MINS, Hong Kong, China, Vietnam, Korea, 2025, SUBTITLED
Official Selection, Busan International Film Festival 2025
The screening on Saturday 21 March will be followed by a Q&A with producer Ziyang Lin.
Jianhang Chen’s beautiful hybrid docufiction feature set between Southeast Asia and southern China, is a poetic meditation on memory, migration, and intergenerational trauma within the Teochew diaspora. In Hong Kong, elderly Vietnamese woman Lam Po Wah, whose life has been shaped by displacement, dreams of returning to childhood scenes. In Ho Chi Minh City, documentarian Ah Wie, carrying Po Wah's 70-year-old family photograph, searches for Po Wah’s long-lost home in Saigon. What connects ancestors, descendants, and the diaspora is the river of their homeland: ‘War may divide us, but only rivers and mountains recount the memories.’
NOTES BY MARIE-PIERRE RICHARD
