“Passage" follows a teenager trying to navigate Hanoi’s complex network of alleyways to find the address of an English tutor with hopes of moving abroad. On her way there, she stumbles upon fragments of the past that offer her a new perspective about her city.

“Passage” by Maya Thao is an ongoing independent project, a 2D mixed-media animated short film to be completed in 2027. The film is set in the Vietnamese capital city of Hanoi and offers an alternative retelling of history by showing the resilience of everyday life and beauty in the mundane, even against the tumultuous war-ridden backdrop of 20th-century Vietnam.

This project aims to:

• Provide a decolonized take on the well-known yet often biasedly displayed historical event of the Vietnam War, while also acknowledging the lesser known contexts leading up to it

• Challenges the harmful, dehumanizing stereotypes towards Vietnamese people that have been shown in American films about the Vietnam war. 

• Humanizes victims of war and conflict in the Global South by showing relatable interactions and relationships regardless of background or circumstance. 

• Relevant and relatable within contemporary cultural context, with the Protagonist’s attitude and aspiration being common among students of economically developing countries. 

• Representation for Vietnamese people in particular and Southeast Asian people in general, bringing awareness to an underrepresented culture. 

• Universal message: as human individuals, we are different but ultimately more similar across space and time, humanity’s resilience, to remember one’s roots and the efforts of those who came before us, and be appreciative of the present. 

By nature, given that this film is based on real-lived experiences and aims to retell history through lens of the mundane that could only be found through ethnographic research, such as word-of-mouth, diary entries, drawings, it is continuously informed and re-informed by the research process.