The film Under the Ashes of the Mekong is a docudrama on the director’s interrogations about the coexistence of traditions and cultures inside oneself, life and death, and the confrontation between great History and individual stories. Against the backdrop of a health crisis and anti-Asian racism, family ties are revealed through conversations questioning her place as the daughter of a Viet Khieu within the lineage. Through their beliefs in reincarnation, she projects herself onto a figure who is familiarly estranged to her: her mother’s cousin, drowned in the Mekong. Creating a link between past and present, war and peace, word and silence. It is through traumatic memory and psychological heritage that the after-effects of a war from which her family escaped reach her, taking precedence in her dreams and in her mind. She asks herself: how to remember and how to preserve what can be lost?