Synopsis

Sea Rose Ashes is a deeply personal lyrical documentary and a poetic reckoning. It is an intimate pilgrimage across continents, decades, and inner terrain. At its center is a mother’s death: murdered in 1983 by a man she once loved—a man who had once been like a father to her son.

Four decades later, that son, Vu Pham returns to the scene not only of the crime, but of origin. Tracing the shape of grief through his own exile and return, he exhumes his mother’s remains from a US cemetery and carries her ashes back to Vietnam, where her story began. Along the way, he seeks answers from the man who ended her life—and confronts the tangled inheritance of trauma, violence, survival, and retributive desire.

In Vietnam, he meets his mother’s sister, his aunt for the first time in 43 years. Pham slides into a bittersweet homecoming that will arouse the demons of silenced questions. Through a series of conversations with his aunt and her daughter, he must contend with the hidden moments of his early life that emerge from their enigmatic family history: a lattice of tragedies, misfortunes, superstitions, and arcane piety.

With meditative elegance and raw honesty, Sea Rose Ashes weaves the personal with the historical and the political with the philosophical. Through archival footage, present-day vérité, poetic voiceover, and intimate interviews, the film revives the oft ignored questions: What does it mean to honor and protect the dead? To reclaim memory? To suffer well?