My obsession with death and the afterlife journey started when I realized how my mother had become so old and fragile. After hearing her regrets, sufferings and unfulfilled wishes in life, I developed this crazy wish where she can get all the happiness she wanted in life whilst her soul is on its journey to heaven.
As I was researching for this film, Mekong River became an important element in this story. Most known as a popular touristic destination in Vietnam, the documentation of the river is my way or memorizing Vietnam and its peculiar mass tourism. I have been to the river at least 4-5 times over the past 10 years, and the tour itself – as we saw in the film – has not changed at all. There was such uncanny resemblances between the tour’s destinations to Vietnamese beliefs of a soul’s journey after death that intertwined together.
Along a muddy river where the souls sail through, around a temple fire where souls are cleansed of their life’s memories, ending it all with a stairway guiding souls towards, perhaps, eternity.