A little girl climbs a steep hill in a mountainous village in northern Vietnam. The director's narration continues, and a thick fog surrounds the village as she says: "In my 3 years of filming, I always feared what it would end up with." What was the director afraid of? For her debut film Children of the Mist, Diem Ha Le visits a remote Hmong village and befriends Di, a teenage girl she got so close to that one could call it a sisterhood. One night, during the Lunar New Year holidays, the director's anxiety becomes a reality when Di is ??abducted?? as a bride by a boy of her age. This is because Di is a part of the Hmong that still recognizes the custom of abducting brides as a ??tradition??. At this point, Children of the Mist captures the tension between the traditional and the modern, while contemplating the ethics involved in making films about the lives of others. In the end, the solution the young director found was friendship. Not a cold observer or an arrogant savior, but a true friend. Such friendship awakens responsibility for the ethical and political relationships the documentary constructs with its characters.​