Profile
Mai Huyền Chi is a writer and director based in Vietnam. Mai's films explore memory, displacement, and belonging, and she approaches filmmaking as an act of care—working collaboratively with communities over years-long processes to create cinema that reclaims overlooked histories and voices.
Mai is the founder of Cinema CNN (Cinema of Peasants), a grassroots screening programme fostering independent cinema and critical dialogue in Vietnam. Her first short documentary, "Down the Stream" (2015), filmed with a floating stateless community near the Vietnam–Cambodia border, was a Vimeo Best of the Year finalist and screened at Winterthur. She co-wrote and co-directed the feature "The Girl From Dak Lak" (2022), about the lives of migrant workers in Ho Chi Minh City, which premiered internationally and was nominated for the Silvestre Award at IndieLisboa. Mai's latest documentary, "50 Years of Forgetting" (2025), commissioned by Al Jazeera, examines the act of remembering and forgetting the legacy of the Vietnam War.
