Mai Huyền Chi
name
Mai Huyền Chi
profession
writer-director
country
Vietnam
biography
Mai Huyền Chi is a Vietnamese writer-director whose work explores memory, identity, and belonging. She began in screenwriting, co-writing My Mr. Wife (Vietnam’s Golden Kite winner), A Brixton Tale (UK, 2022), and The Girl from Dak Lak (2022), which she also co-directed. Her recent directing includes 50 Years of Forgetting (Al Jazeera, 2025) and The River Runs Still (NYAFF, 2025). Her debut feature The River Knows Our Names won the Tokyo Talents Award 2024.
previous work
DOWN THE STREAM (documentary, 2015) – director, editor
MY MR. WIFE (2018) – co-writer
A BRIXTON TALE (2021) – co-writer
AUGUST LETTERS (documentary, 2021) – director, editor, producer
THE GIRL FROM DAKLAK (2022) – writer, co-director
THE RIVER RUNS STILL (2024) – writer, director, producer
50 YEARS OF FORGETTING (documentaty, 2025) – writer, director
Commissioned by Al Jazeera
THE RIVER KNOWS OUR NAMES (2027) – in development
website
social media
Where Shall I Lay This Body
working title
Where Shall I Lay This Body
project status
in development
logline / short synopsis
Ha prepares to bury her husband when a lucrative offer comes for his burial plot. Her daughters refrigerate his body and pressure her to find burial sites among hills peppered with “for sale” signs. While her daughters focus on money and logistics, Ha meets an aging gravedigger who has tended this land where her father’s body likely rests unfound from the war. Like her, he’s displaced by land fever sweeping ancestral grounds. As surreal visions of dancing spirits and Tetris-like arrangements blur memory and reality, Ha finds unexpected understanding with this stranger while feeling increasingly disconnected from her daughters’ modern pragmatism, forcing her to discover what she’s truly ready to let go.