Sundance Film Festival 2022: Maika Director Ham Tran Talks Directing The First Ever Vietnamese Sci-Fi Family Film
Director Ham Tran returns to Sundance with a Vietnamese sci-fi kids adventure Maika that connects with both kids and kids at heart. With the colorful aesthetic of a Robert Rodriguez kids film, Tran expertly tackles grief and friendship while highlighting the Vietnamese experience. I spoke with Tran at Sundance Film Festival 2022 about the inspiration behind Maika and what it was like creating the first family sci-fi film out of Vietnam.
Maika follows the story of a young boy named Hung (Lai Truong Pau) who lost his mother and has a hard time connecting to his father. Everything changes when he meets an alien girl from the planet Maika (Chu Deep Anh). The two become fast friends as he helps her find her lost comrade and she helps heal his broken heart. But… there’s danger everywhere. “On the surface, it's a kids film. It's really fun. You've got a lot of farts. You've got a lot of fun toys and things like that, but at the end of the day, it’s also layered,” Tran shared with me. “Having lost my mother as well, [I] put a lot of my own experience [in the film]. They say, write what you know, right? So that’s what I was going through and, in a way, Maika helped me overcome my own grief. Now this film is a tribute to my mom.”
Tran opened up about bringing sci-fi to Vietnam and bringing the first Vietnamese film to Sundance. “We wanted to make a film about Vietnam from Vietnam. This is the first Vietnamese-produced feature to be screened at Sundance in the history of Vietnamese films,” he said. “There's only been one other sci-fi movie that's been made in Vietnam, so this is the first family sci-fi. Vietnamese people don't usually watch sci-fi because they feel like they don't relate to the sci-fi films, [but] I think that it's a misconception of what sci-fi is. What sci-fi is is at the bottom line […] is about the human struggle. Our experience interacting with the aliens helps us recognize our own human frailties.”
“My first feature was about Vietnamese refugees after the Vietnam War. I think that a lot of times foreigners watch Vietnamese films [that] mostly have to do with the war. For us, we wanted to present a film about Vietnam that is not about the war. We wanted to give people a glimpse into modern Vietnam,” Tran continued. “The other thing is that we hope that this opens people's expectations when they think about Vietnamese films. We're not just art house films. We can have commercial films and they don’t necessarily just have to be dramas or broad comedies. They can be something that the entire family can enjoy.”
Currently Tran and his team are looking for a North American distributor in hopes of getting Maika released theatrically. “My best hope is that we can release this, not just for Vietnamese Americans to go see, [but for] all Americans of all ages to go see this because at the core of it there’s a very strong message about family,” he said. “All we have to do sometimes as parents [is just be] there for our kids and remind them that they’re being supported and that they’re loved. No matter what happens, even if one parents passes away, they can still remember that love and carry that with them.”
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