Mother Fish

Mother Fish (2010)

Two sisters brave the ocean to find a safe home.

The present melds with the past as a quiet factory worker relives the extraordinary journey when she and her sister took to the sea as refugees in a creaky river boat in search of a better life.

Date of release
2010-08-05
Runtime
1h 32m
Genres
Drama
Director
Khoa Do

Casting

Interesting facts

Mother Fish, also known as Missing Water, is a feature film written, produced and directed by Khoa Do. The film draws largely from Khoa Do's own experiences as a Vietnamese refugee, and reflects on the perceived fear in the general population generated by 'boat people' which is prevalent in Australian politics and discourse.

Production

A defining feature of Mother Fish is that it was shot in a similar style to Lars von Trier's Dogville, by setting all the action entirely within the sweatshop.

Do chose to work with first-time actors who had all either been refugees or descendants of refugees. Hieu Phan, who plays the woman's Uncle, was a refugee who made the crossing 30 years ago, and has spoken of weeping in rehearsals as the memory of his own boat journey came back to him. While shooting, the cast were kept on a strict monitored diet to lose weight in a similar manner to refugees who had made the crossing.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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