Film archive, 2025

The River That Holds Our Hands

擁啊擁

Director CHEN Jianhang

1Festival entries

★Avg. rating

Aunt Po Wah, born in Vietnam in 1950 to Chinese parents, was separated from her family when war broke out during a visit to see relatives in Cambodia with her grandmother. Although she was tied up, she later makes her way back to China as a teenager and soon finds herself in the chaotic period of the Cultural Revolution. The first-person narrator, a documentary director and member of the Teochew ethnic minority group, takes an old black-and-white photograph and heads for Ho Chih Minh City to find Aunt Po Wah’s former home. What connects ancestors, descendants, those who returned and those who never did, and those still living in diaspora is the river of their homeland—its shimmering ripples and the babbling sound of water. This film documents the flow and continuation of those sounds. Recipient of the 2025 ACF Post-Production Fund, this is Chen Jianhang’s feature debut.