“Children of the Mist” tells the emotional growth journey of 12-year-old Di, a Mong ethnic girl in Sa Pa northern mountainous Lao Cai province. In the 100-minute documentary, Di struggles between traditional and modern cultural values, a challenge that many ethnic minority girls face in today's society. Diem brilliantly puts her camera in the center of Di’s conflicting life to tell the story of children growing from a deep-rooted tradition amid the modern outside world.

Freelance film and culture writer Marya E. Gates wrote in Screen Daily that the film plants seeds for the kind of future Di aspires towards but is smart enough not to make promises to her or to the audience as to whether she can achieve them. It also does not judge the community for their traditions, presenting them in all their complexity, she added. Ultimately, “Children of the Mist” merely asks us to remember that the world is filled with girls like Di and hopes that a brighter future is possible for them, Gates said.

Diem said it took her nearly four years for this private project which required her to travel back and forth many times between her hometown Bac Kan, Hanoi, and Sapa. She said that to make this film, she needed to visit Sa Pa in different times of  year, for example: before, during, and after Tet, before and after the summer holiday, or around the harvest season.

"Sometimes, I stayed a whole month just to record for a couple of days. Even still, only a particular time of a day was suitable for the recording, not the whole day", Diem added.

Director Ha Le Diem. (Photo courtesy of Ha Le Diem)

The film won the 2021 International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) Award for Best Directing, and the 2022 Balimakarya Film Festival in Indonesia for Best Documentary film. According to the organizers of IDFA, documentary filmmakers sometimes establish close relationships with characters that interfere with their directorial role. But Diem has created a balance, separating her feelings from the emotional story of a Mong girl stuck between childhood and adulthood, between tradition and modernity in the countryside of Vietnam.

The young director of the Tay ethnic minority said she will never forget the days filming with the main character and her relatives and friends. 

"I also worked as the camera operator. I had to walk 40-50km per day when filming Di enjoying the spring festival with her friends. I could carry along nothing but some money and two camera batteries. I had to wear rubber boots and sandals and climbing clothes that are warterproof and easy to clean and dry," said Diem.

Editing and post-editing was an equally hard and time-consuming process for Diem and her team. After three and a half years, Diem filmed nearly 100 hours. Then she chose 50-60 hours to translate from the Mong language into Vietnamese and English.

"There was lot of work that I and advisors had never done before such as preparing a contract and dealing with the producer and distributor,” Diem added.  

Diem said she hopes to bring more stories about the Vietnamese highlands people to a wider audience. She understands the challenges young girls on the mountain are facing in their quest for a brighter future. As a director, Diem serves both as a narrator and her character’s companion “of the mist.”