As a Community Partner of the DOXA Documentary Film Festival, Ricepaper Magazine is proud to stand in conversation with a compelling slate of films. For over three decades, Ricepaper has supported the work of Asian Canadian and diasporic voices. As part of this year’s festival, Ricepaper highlights the following films that focus on work that dwells in the in-between, resists erasure, and insists on intersectional and cultural identities, stories that resonate with our readers and audiences.
Replica (Directed by Chouwa Liang)
Replica
91 minutes | Australia/France | 2026
In contemporary China, three women turn to AI lovers to fill emotional gaps shaped by family, marriage, and independence. Qin, a factory worker in her twenties, creates a devoted virtual boyfriend to escape loneliness. Muna, a married housewife, uses AI to reclaim desire and autonomy. Sonya, confident and independent, treats AI as an emotional experiment—until it betrays her expectations. As their virtual relationships deepen, Replica reveals the fragile boundary between emotional freedom and reliance on AI, and explores how AI reshapes love, intimacy, and gender in modern China.
Saigon Story: Two Shootings in the Forest Kingdom (Directed by Kim Nguyen)
Saigon Story: Two Shootings in the Forest Kingdom
92 minutes | Canada | 2026
A woman in Washington state conceals the scars of a brutal family secret. A veteran journalist in Saigon helps two siblings solve a painful wartime mystery. And a photo becomes so iconic that it takes on a life of its own. Spanning decades and continents, these remarkable accounts collide in Oscar®-nominated filmmaker Kim Nguyen’s Saigon Story: Two Shootings in the Forest Kingdom. Armed with a powerful visual style, Nguyen reveals the intimate connection between two families and Eddie Adams’ Saigon Execution. This image forever changed the world’s perception of the Vietnam War. Shining a light on the long and sometimes surprising road to healing, Nguyen carefully uncovers the hidden truths of war, family and photography itself. What ultimately emerges is a kaleidoscope of humanity, one exploding with beauty, pain and the complex patterns of wartime memories.
Numakage Public Pool (Directed by Shingo Ota)
Numakage Public Pool
80 minutes | Japan | 2025
For over 50 years, Numakage, a public swimming pool complex called the “ocean” within a landlocked city in the suburbs of Tokyo, has served as a much-loved place for the elderly to improve their health, as a leisure facility for children and families, and as one of Japan’s best-known cruising pools for gay men. However, the urban development plan forces the pool to be demolished, ignoring the opposition of many residents and generating a sense of loss in the community. With Numakage Public Pool, Shingo Ota explores the nature of grief by using five psychological processes of denial, anger, negotiation, depression and acceptance, as examined by the psychiatrist Kübler-Ross, and questions the importance of loss that is usually only associated with human death.
There Are No Words (Directed by Min Sook Lee)
There Are No Words
99 minutes | Canada | 2025
Award-winning filmmaker Min Sook Lee turns the camera on herself in this urgent documentary, searching for memories of her mother, Song Ji Lee, who died by suicide when Lee was just 12 years old. Confrontational and speculative, There Are No Words contemplates how trauma fractures memory as Lee revisits the people and places of her childhood in Toronto, Canada, and Hwasun, South Korea, her place of birth. A looming figure in this search is Lee’s now 90-year-old father, who met her mother while serving in a national intelligence agency under dictator Park Chung Hee in 1960s South Korea. He is her last direct connection to her mother, although he’s an unreliable narrator with a history of abuse who speaks in a mother tongue she cannot fully understand. Through a fabric of real and imagined histories, Lee reveals that some stories must still be told, even when there are no words for grief.
Under the Red Roof (Directed by Yushi Nagamatsu)
Under the Red Roof
68 minutes | Japan | 2025
Under the Red Roof quietly observes the final months of Nozuka Elementary School — a rural school in the coastal town of Shakotan, Hokkaido, closing after 134 years due to a declining population. Only four children remain: three sixth-graders about to graduate, and Taiyo, the only second-grader left. As his older classmates prepare to move on, Taiyo watches the only world he has ever known slowly disappear. Through his eyes, the film reflects on the fleeting warmth of childhood and the tender impermanence of growing up.
Ricepaper Magazine is proud to support the journeys of these films to the screen. Please visit the festival website for more information about the rest of the festival program and ticket sales.