Fluid Narratives: The Journey of Water in Vietnamese Contemporary Theatre, Prose, and Cinema

This article explores water as a crucial narrative force, influencing and being influenced by human lives, from Vietnam’s unique traditional múa roi nước, an art form born from the flooded fields of the Red River Delta, to current narratives that grapple with the existential threats posed by climate change, and ecological degradation in the Mekong Delta. The discussion focuses on Buffalo Boy (2004), a film adaptation of a short story about life in the floodplains; 2030 (2014), a dystopian movie of the water crisis in the near future, both by Nguyen Võ Nghiêm Minh; and Water: A Chronicle (2022), a novel about water’s entanglement with human fate by Nguyen Ngoc Tư. By analyzing these three works, this paper investigates how the network of cultural narratives, spanning theatre, prose, and cinema, embodied the journey of water from mythological origins to contemporary ecological crises in both literary and visual languages. How have humans been born, thrived, and perished both in tune and in discord with water?