Would she smile, knowing the tender care my mother puts into growing bitter melons? mẹ con intimately portrays the relationship between a Vietnamese woman, the plants she grows, and memories of her mother. Through an experimental lens, the short film explores family archives as well as created memories within the garden through film photography.

Director Statement

I am a queer Vietnamese American filmmaker. My roots are in the South (Florida + Mississippi) and I’ve been working towards telling stories of communities of color based in the South, as representation is severely lacking.

Like many children of diasporic families, I’ve lived my life through translation. I remember being at a very young age, perhaps nine or ten, and trying to twist my tongue into unfamiliar shapes to explain an electric bill to my parents. I, who only had bits and pieces, leftovers, of the Vietnamese that my parents lived and breathed, found it so difficult to communicate with them. Though I’m more confident in my ability to switch between English and Vietnamese, I’m still at a loss for words when I tell them stories. I found creative writing - poetry and shorts- as a means to reflect, understand the world around me, and my role/the identities that shape me. However, the people that I want to read my writing the most aren’t able to. Although this has saddened me deeply, I’ve realized that there are other ways to communicate and share stories with my parents and bridge that gap. This relationship has colored the way that I’ve approached filmmaking. I’ve found myself relying less on dialogue to convey information. Rather, I focus on the layers of meaning evoked from specific images in relationship to sound. Within creative writing, the intentionality that you have with words - the choices, the rhythms, the scenes that you paint - lend to your voice. I feel like my voice as a filmmaker is grounded in poetics - the intentionality that I have when guiding my camera, creating intimate moments between what’s shown on screen with the audience, and decisions when I’m editing.

Director - Melanie Dang Ho

Melanie Ho (co-director/producer) is a 2nd generation Vietnamese American with roots in Florida and Mississippi. Her documentary, sống ở đây, explores the Vietnamese community in New Orleans and the relationship between land and labor. It was nominated for Best Short for the 2020 IDA Awards and is finishing a film festival circuit run (CAAMFest, SDAFF, AAIFF, NOFF). She was a 2021 CAAM “The Sauce Fellow”, a 2022 NeXt Doc Fellow and an inaugural fellow for the Gotham/HBO Documentary Development Initiative.