Towards the end of Hair, Paper, Water, Mme Hậu and her grandson are seen sliding on a river in a boat, along with the Bolex 16mm camera used to film the movie. This camera, which must be rewound manually before each shot, can only record about twenty-five seconds of footage. This limitation leads to a fragmented portrayal of reality, focusing on fleeting gestures and impressions—such as a hand touching the water or resting on a rock. As Mme Hậu recounts her birth in a cave in central Vietnam, the boat moves gradually toward that location, merging the present with a memory from the past. The film blends everyday actions, recollections, and visions, which are not always clearly defined. While these elements follow a certain logic, their sequence is not entirely free, guided by recurring learning scenes. One such recurring scene involves Mme Hậu reciting words in her native language, rục, including terms like fire, ice, dream, hair, paper, and water. These words are displayed on screen, and her grandson repeats them. Filmmakers Nicolas Graux and Trương Minh Quý use this mantra to create a visual narrative akin to a sensitive picture book. For instance, when the word "rain" appears, it is paired with a shot reminiscent of filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky's style: the camera begins with raindrops falling from a beam, then moves down to the boat and the landscape under the downpour. This shot does not simply illustrate the word; it captures its emotional and sensory impact by shifting in scale from a single drop to an entire world drenched in water. The word "flood" that follows suggests an increase in intensity, highlighting how water shapes the rhythm and texture of the sequence. The film's focus on the sensory and material aspects of things is not limited to visuals. Since the Bolex camera does not record sound, the audio elements are crafted separately from voices, noises, and atmospheres collected during filming. This process, which exaggerates certain sounds, allows the audience to experience the river's movement with almost tactile precision—the sound of the boat's hull cutting through the water, the paddle's motion on the surface, and the buzzing of insects. These sounds, though present in the original scene, are usually not isolated in everyday listening. This "sonic close-up" technique, similar to Tarkovsky's style, gives these elements a physical presence and duration. The same approach applies to the words spoken in rục, which are passed from Mme Hậu's voice to her grandson's, each carrying a unique timbre, rhythm, and breath that add emotional depth. However, this method also has its challenges. When the connections between scenes become less clear, the editing risks creating a disjointed experience, where the sequence of fragments seems interchangeable, contributing more to an atmosphere than to precise narrative links. The film is most powerful when it builds an entire sequence around a single motif. The word "dream" provides a compelling example, as Mme Hậu recounts a dream where her deceased mother appears, asks her to return "home" to the cave of her birth, and caresses her hair. This narrative is interwoven with images of her wandering through Saigon and a cemetery, and a train moving through the landscape with sleeping passengers. The rhythmic sound of the train wheels on the tracks echoes the passage to the Zone in Stalker, transforming the train into a bridge between different layers of reality—connecting Saigon with her native land, the journey she is on with the dream of returning, and the present with her past memories. The film thus constructs a genealogy of memory, where time and place are layered rather than sequential.