Nước

Nước follows two intertwined personal histories: one focused on the daughter of a former South Vietnamese army captain, the other on a Vietnamese orphan who was adopted and raised by an American family. The film pieces together memories, conversations and quiet moments to show how the past keeps surfacing in the present, shaping language, family dynamics and selfhood. Rather than pushing a grand narrative, it lingers on small gestures and recollections, letting the subjects articulate loss, belonging and cultural dissonance in their own words. It shifts between past and present subtly, quietly.

Directed by Bing Liu and released in 2010, Nước is an independent documentary that foregrounds Vietnamese American personal narratives. Made early in Liu's career, it favors intimate testimony over broad historical framing and was produced outside the studio system, independently.

No reliable box office information is available for Nước. Like many small documentaries, it appears to have had a limited release, screening mainly at community showings or smaller festivals rather than wide commercial distribution, or revenues.

Nước adds to representation of Vietnamese American experiences on film, offering intimate moments and everyday memory that resonate for viewers familiar with displacement and cultural adaptation. Its quiet approach gives space to voices rarely centered in mainstream US documentary cinema, and its modest scale highlights everyday gestures and interfamily language shifts.

The film has few recorded ratings, with a listed vote average of 0.0/10 based on no votes, so formal critical consensus is scarce. Thematically it addresses memory, identity, intergenerational transmission and the subtle ways immigration shapes family life. It probes how memory and language carry trauma and hope across generations.