Inspired by stories from his father’s childhood, Li commented that with Rivers and My Father, he hoped “to contribute to the documentation and preservation of local history through the representation of ordinary people’s stories and memories.” He grew up along the Yangtze River (Chang Jiang) in China and returned there from Canada to shoot the film. In Rivers and My Father, Li illustrates his father’s memories with a series of elegantly composed, repeating shots—a boy and a woman walking up steps, a man swimming, a trio of boys walking along the riverbank—creating a gentle, and sometimes humorous, tension between past and present, father and son.