Vibe
Hùng is eight years old, living with his father in Đà Nẵng after the death of his mother. His closest friend is moving away, his relationship with his father has become strained, and a pushy landlord adds pressure to their home life. One night, after watching the sky, Hùng follows what looks like a fallen meteor and discovers Maika, an alien girl separated from her companion. Maika has extraordinary abilities but little understanding of ordinary human behavior. Hùng agrees to help her find a way home, and the two are soon joined by another boy, Béo. Their search becomes a comic adventure involving improvised technology, bullying, greedy adults, pursuit, and Maika’s unpredictable powers. As Hùng helps Maika recover what she has lost, she helps him confront the absence that has defined his own life.
Watch for
- Science fiction at child scale: The movie avoids trying to imitate Hollywood space spectacle. Remote-control aircraft, homemade contraptions, apartment rooftops, smartphones, toys, and neighborhood spaces keep the science-fiction premise grounded in the practical world of children.
- Grief underneath the comedy: Hùng’s loss is not a disposable backstory. The movie repeatedly returns to memory, his mother’s absence, and his inability to reconnect with his father. The adventure works because Maika’s search for someone missing parallels Hùng’s emotional condition.
- A Vietnamese afterlife for an imported childhood icon: Older Vietnamese viewers may recognize the Maika concept from the Czechoslovak television series that circulated decades earlier. The film uses that memory as a starting point, then remakes the character through contemporary Vietnamese children, locations, humor, and family dynamics.
- The children carry the film: Lại Trường Phú, Chu Diệp Anh, and Tin Tin are asked to sustain both broad physical comedy and sincere emotion. Their chemistry matters more than the villains or effects; when the film works, it works because the friendship feels like play rather than plot machinery.
Production notes
The feature was written and directed by Hàm Trần, with story credit to Vincent Ngô and production involving BHD and East Films among its principal partners. Sundance’s official 2022 lineup credited producers Jenni Trang Lê, Duy Ho, Anderson Le, and Bao Nguyen and selected Maika for a world premiere in its Kids program on January 22, 2022. Contemporary Vietnamese coverage also described the film as one of the relatively uncommon projects produced with state commissioning/funding in partnership with private companies. The project’s emotional development is unusually well documented. Hàm Trần’s mother died in 2018, and he has said that he initially felt unable to continue working. When he was shown the outline about a boy grieving his mother and meeting an alien girl, he immediately identified with Hùng. He incorporated his own memories into the screenplay, including a line spoken by Hùng’s mother in hospital that reproduced the final words his mother said to him. The film took roughly three years to complete through difficult conditions that included weather and the pandemic period. After Sundance, Maika opened theatrically in Vietnam on May 27, 2022. Well Go USA released it in U.S. theaters on June 3 and funded an English-language dub directed by Hàm Trần, an unusual investment for a Vietnamese family feature. Runtime sources differ: the international distributor, IMDb, Apple TV, and TMDb-linked data report 105 minutes, while Galaxy’s domestic archive reports 108.
Trivia
- The character concept was inspired by the Czechoslovak television series Spadla z oblakov / She Fell from the Clouds, which became a remembered children's program in Vietnam decades earlier.
- Hàm Trần has said the film became a tribute to his mother, who died in 2018; a hospital line spoken by Hùng’s mother reproduces words his own mother said to him during their final meeting.
- Maika had its world premiere in the Kids program at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.
- The film was made with public-sector participation and private production partners, an unusual financing path for a Vietnamese children’s science-fiction feature.
- Well Go USA funded an English dub for the North American release, with Hàm Trần directing the dubbed version as well.
Legacy
Maika’s importance comes partly from scarcity. Vietnamese commercial cinema produces relatively few live-action features specifically for children, and fewer still treat science fiction as a natural genre for a Vietnamese family audience. The film therefore occupies a distinctive position even before considering its festival history. Sundance gave it a high-profile world premiere, while Well Go USA’s theatrical release and English dub demonstrated confidence that its emotional and comic language could travel beyond Vietnamese-speaking audiences. Its other legacy is personal. Hàm Trần transformed an inherited pop-cultural memory—the Maika character remembered from Czechoslovak television—into a film about his own experience of losing his mother. That combination of imported childhood icon and Vietnamese-American filmmaker memory gives the feature unusual layers: it is nostalgic without being set in the past, culturally hybrid without losing its Vietnamese setting, and child-oriented without pretending that children are untouched by grief. Movie Night is designed for discovery. Maika shows a corner of Vietnamese cinema that commercial rankings can easily overlook: ambitious, sincere family filmmaking willing to put an alien, a grieving boy, and a very local urban childhood into the same frame.