This text appeared within the June 13, 2025 version of The Film Remark Letter, our free weekly publication that includes authentic movie criticism and writing. Join the Letter right here.

Sea Inside a Sea (Danech San, 2021)

Cambodian filmmaker Danech San accomplished her quick movie Sea Inside a Sea in 2021 on Koh Sdach (King Island)—an island that’s dwelling to a fishing village identified to Cambodians as a non-touristy trip spot. The movie paperwork the marine conservation efforts of native diver Srenh Sorn as he displays the Koh Sdach archipelago’s declining seahorse inhabitants and coral well being amid speedy improvement. San had at all times deliberate on screening the movie for the residents of the island. In 2024, whereas placing the screening along with the movie’s manufacturing firm, unbiased Cambodian movie collective Anti-Archive, she considered increasing the occasion’s scope. She enlisted the assistance of influential Southeast Asian movie fund Purin Footage to arrange a three-day pageant. Given the shortage of cinemas and screening infrastructure on Cambodian islands, the pageant aimed to supply screenings of regionally made movies, each up to date and basic, in addition to filmmaking workshops to islanders who reside distant from cultural facilities. The primary Kampung Film Festival befell in February 2024, drawing giant crowds of native residents and enthusiastic scholar participation in its animation and images workshops.

The resounding success of that inaugural program meant that the pageant has now turn out to be an annual occasion. The second version befell from February 21–23 earlier this yr and introduced collectively the residents of Koh Sdach and close by islands in addition to Thai and Vietnamese coastal islanders from the Gulf of Thailand and members and buddies of the organizing committee, who travelled from the capital metropolis of Phnom Penh to Koh Sdach by means of a six-hour bus and boat journey. (I traveled from Singapore on the invitation of the editor-in-chief of MARG1N journal, Savunthara Seng, who hadn’t stopped speaking to me in regards to the pageant since he helped set up it final yr.) On the primary day, attendees gathered on the Seahorse Inn, a visitor home that doubled as pageant headquarters, earlier than trekking up a small hill, atop which a big, inflatable display had been arrange. The temper was convivial: timber have been festooned with neon lights and boisterous youngsters ran by means of the crowds; close by, volunteers distributed Monobloc chairs for seating.

The Kampung Film Festival’s crucial to point out Cambodian movies throughout time and style to a neighborhood viewers is a defiant assertion and reclamation of a misplaced historical past. Underneath the Khmer Rouge regime (1975-1979)—which noticed the deaths of as much as three million Cambodians and the systematic destruction of all cultural artifacts in pursuit of 12 months Zero—cinemas have been shut down, filmmakers and actors have been massacred, and greater than 400 movies that had been made for the reason that beginnings of the Cambodian movie business in 1960 have been both banned, destroyed, or left to rot within the tropical warmth by these escaping the regime. In keeping with the brand new e-book Remnants of the Previous: A Filmography of Early Cambodian Cinema, by scholar Dr. LinDa Saphan and archivist Nate Hun, the dearth of surviving pre-Khmer Rouge–period movies in Cambodia has resulted in a profitable up to date business centered on piracy, secrecy, and suspicion, the place authentic reels and uncommon footage which have survived are offered to the very best bidders.

The e-book lists some 50 movies which have been recovered, albeit in incomplete situation, and cobbled collectively within the years after the autumn of the regime by mysterious non-public collectors who sought to show a revenue by releasing VHS tapes of broken 16mm reels. However there’s additionally a world group of cinephiles who’ve strived to search out and make these movies broadly accessible—it contains Hun, who maintains a YouTube channel of Khmer motion pictures and music, and Vathana Huy, who has shared very important firsthand details about the cinema of the period through an influential weblog. The opening movie of the 2025 Kampung Film Festival, Pel Del Trov Youm (Time to Cry, 1972) by Uong Citta (then generally known as Uong Kanthouk), was found by Davy Chou—co-founder of Anti-Archive and acclaimed director of Return to Seoul (2022)—in Huy’s private DVD assortment whereas doing analysis for Golden Slumbers, Chou’s 2011 documentary about Cambodia’s pre-1975 cinematic golden age.

Earlier than escaping to France in 1975, Uong was famend for her delicate portrayals of brave and tragic amorous affairs throughout six well-liked characteristic movies. A lot of them starred her frequent collaborators, onscreen energy couple Kong Som Oeun and Vichara Dany, who painting star-crossed lovers Vichet and Vichara in Pel Del Trov Youm. Within the reflexive movie, they play actors working in an business marred by nepotism and corruption. After a meet-cute that finds the daydreaming couple bicycling right into a pond, a collection of twists proceeds to go away Vichet widowed and Vichara with a damaged engagement. The 2 reunite on a movie set to shoot a love story that mirrors their very own. Within the penultimate scene, their director instructs them to run towards one another on a bridge and hug whereas the digital camera zooms into their glad ending. However on the Kampung screening, the film abruptly reduce from Vichet and Vichara operating on the bridge to the couple by some means having fallen within the water. It turned out that the second of their dramatic reunion is one among a number of scenes lacking from the surviving model of the movie.

For Uong, who retreated from filmmaking after transferring to France, the lack of this beautiful scene was insufferable. In a uncommon 2021 interview in Saphan’s 2022 e-book, Light Reels: The Artwork of 4 Cambodian Filmmakers, Uong stated, “It hurts to see the surviving footage with lacking frames. I really want to not watch them in any respect.” However Pel Del Trov Youm was given a brand new life with the viewers on the pageant, who didn’t appear to thoughts these gaps in any respect: they roared with laughter on the movie’s charming slapstick comedy and cheered at its grand romantic turns. In a non-public dialog after the screening, Chou identified that the poor picture high quality of the DVD means that it was doubtless duplicated from a compressed Video CD that was recorded from VHS tapes, which in flip have been most likely derived from broken 16mm reels. The trouble dedicated to preserving the movie by means of generational format modifications is significant—it implies that the film was valuable to somebody.

Certainly, the methods wherein love retains issues—and folks—alive appeared to be the thread operating by means of Kampung 2025. In Rithy Panh’s One Night After the Warfare, which premiered within the Un Sure Regard part at Cannes in 1998, a intercourse employee, Srey Poeuv (Chea Lyda Chan), narrates the lifetime of her lover, Savannah (Narith Roeun). After 4 years spent combating the Khmer Rouge within the jungle, Savannah and his buddies return from the entrance on a “demise wagon”—a practice ferrying these with “nothing to lose” and desperately searching for work into the unforgiving metropolis of Phnom Penh. Savannah works laborious to turn out to be a profitable kickboxer and picks up no matter odd jobs he can on the slaughterhouse, all whereas courting Srey Poeuv. However nothing goes as deliberate: his earnings are by no means sufficient to assist himself, not to mention to permit Srey Poeuv to stop her job, and his futile struggles in opposition to poverty make him a unstable, usually violent lover. When a former comrade proposes a jewellery retailer heist, Savannah goes together with it, and we be taught why Srey Poeuv is telling the story on his behalf: Savannah is gunned down brutally through the failed theft, leaving Srey Poeuv to boost their little one alone. He could also be simply one other casualty of the warfare and the cycles of violence that persist lengthy after it, but Srey Poeuv’s recollection of him and their romance emerges as a profound act of affection—one which commits Savannah’s struggles to historical past with extraordinary dignity.

One of many more moderen movies screened at Kampung was Steve Chen’s beautiful debut characteristic, Dream Land (2015). Lida, performed by Lida Duch, is a younger real-estate agent. At work, she confidently guides her purchasers to their aspirational home; off the clock, she indulges in romance comics and love ballads. The issue is her elusive boyfriend can’t decide to something past the nice companionship they share at any time when they meet. On a visit to the seashore city of Kep together with her buddies, Lida visits a royal home that predates the Khmer Rouge, and says, “I need to erase all the reminiscences.” Whereas she is moping, a well-known jingle commissioned by the Ministry of Tourism in Cambodia, “Ecotourism Marks Kep Glory in Historical past,” performs on the soundtrack, whereas karaoke-style lyrics seem on-screen: “Kep’s magnificence is a present from the gods . . . The priceless nature retains vacationers right here longer.” It’s a second of wry humor that factors to how a website that stands as a relic of Cambodia’s colonial and monarchical previous has been commodified as a reasonably backdrop for misplaced younger individuals searching for an escape from their quotidian troubles. In the middle of the movie, Lida lastly acknowledges that erasing reminiscences of the previous, nevertheless troublesome they is perhaps, prevents us from dwelling totally within the current.

“Kampung” is Khmer for “dock” and seems within the names of provinces adjoining to the Mekong River. It additionally means “village” in Malay, and its connotations vary from Indigenous dwellings to city slums throughout Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. Over a long time of speedy urbanization throughout Southeast Asia, to not point out the unfold of ecotourism and trip resorts within the area, kampungs have steadily disappeared; the time period now evokes nostalgia for a bygone period of group and solidarity between neighbors. San, who’s at the moment engaged on a story characteristic set on Koh Sdach, advised me on the pageant that there’s an actual risk that the places she needs to shoot will now not be there by the point manufacturing begins. Amid the change and erasure, the Kampung Film Festival serves as an invigorating tribute to the communal life and shared traditions that hold the previous alive, in opposition to all odds.

Sasha Han is a movie author and programmer based mostly in Singapore. Her writing has been revealed by the Asian Film Archive, Documentary Journal, MARG1N, Mekong Evaluate, MUBI Pocket book, and the Singapore Film Society.