Flowing Home (2021)

Flowing Home Review

Flowing Home is a 2021 animated short film directed by Sandra Desmazieres. It is a moving historical flick.

Two sisters grow up in Vietnam and are separated by the war between North and South. After the fall of Saigon in 1975, Thao, in her teens, must leave the country with her uncle. Her sister Saoi Maï, only a little older, remains with their parents, hoping they will soon be reunited. But their separation will last nearly 20 years, and the letters they exchange are their only way to connect and relieve their loneliness. Thao and Sao Maï write about their everyday lives, their memories, the war, and its ghosts.

This is a very sweet, elegant movie that isn’t anything original nor is it as dramatic as I would have liked it to have been, but the short is very well animated, superbly scored and so well edited. It’s a technically polished, emotionally charged look into the war in Vietnam and its immediate consequences on the people who lived through it. The epistolary approach was also quite wonderful. The movie is very touching, but I wish that it developed its characters a bit better.

Flowing Home is uneven, but still gorgeously animated, scored and made with a very touching story to boost.

My Rating – 4