Creator
Allison Chhorn
Allison Chhorn is a Cambodian-Australian filmmaker and artist from Adelaide whose films, some of them in Khmer, deal with memory and the Cambodian diaspora.
Allison Chhorn is a Cambodian-Australian filmmaker and artist from Adelaide whose films deal with memory and the Cambodian diaspora.[1][2] She works across film, installation, photography, painting and music.[1][3] Her work looks at migrant displacement and at memories inherited from earlier generations, and family members often appear in it.[1]
Early life and training
Chhorn was born in Adelaide in South Australia and grew up as a second-generation Cambodian-Australian.[3][4] She spoke Khmer at home and learned English at school.[1] She studied visual arts at the University of South Australia and graduated with an honors degree.[3] She first specialized in painting there, then moved to sculpture and photography, and finally to film.[4]
In 2015 she co-founded the Port Film Co-op. She was a producer and editor on the feature films Stanley's Mouth (2015) and Youth on the March (2017), and directed short films of her own.[3] Her short drama Last Time (2018) was selected for the Adelaide Film Festival in 2018.[5]
Films
The Plastic House
The Plastic House (2019) is a docu-fiction with almost no dialogue, in Khmer with English subtitles.[6][2] It runs 45 minutes[4] or 46 minutes.[6] The film takes place almost entirely in and around a run-down greenhouse belonging to her Cambodian family, and it grew out of the time she spent working there.[6][4] She shot it in long takes, with a sound design built from natural sounds recorded on location.[2]
The film had its world premiere at the OzAsia Festival in Adelaide in October 2019.[5][4] Its international premiere followed at the Visions du Réel festival in Switzerland in April 2020.[5] Later in 2020 it was shown at the Melbourne International Film Festival and in the Currents section of the 58th New York Film Festival.[7][6]
After Years
In January 2020 Chhorn was researching and filming After Years, a documentary project about Cambodian families of the diaspora living in Australia, North America and France. Its subjects included the Cambodian-American poet Monica Sok. That month she received 10,000 Australian dollars from Carclew's Project and Development grants to complete the project.[2] She told The Adelaide Review that she hoped to "uncover stories of Cambodian diaspora in a personal and poetic way which hasn't really been fully explored in Australian film."[2]
Blind Body
Blind Body (2021) is a 15-minute documentary short, an impressionistic portrait of her grandmother.[8] It was shown at the Sydney Film Festival in 2021 and the Adelaide Film Festival in 2022.[8] Its festival screenings also included the Cambodia International Film Festival.[5] Chhorn told the magazine Liminal that making it showed her "how the medium of film could be a tool for empathy."[1]
Missing
Missing (2021) is a seven-minute film commissioned by Prototype.[5][1] It shows the separation of the Cambodian diaspora through two generations, a mother and a daughter who live far apart. The film moves between English and Khmer and Monica Sok appears in it, reading part of her poetry.[5][1]
Lost in the Water
Lost in the Water is a 12-minute experimental film in Khmer, shot on Super 8 film in Cambodia.[7][5] It is dated 2025[7] or 2026.[5] The film recreates old footage of everyday life by the Mekong River in the Cambodian countryside, such as cooking, rice planting and children at school, before an imagined flash flood covers everything.[5] It had its world premiere at the Melbourne International Film Festival in August 2026.[7]
Installation and exhibitions
Chhorn received the Porter St Commission from the Adelaide Contemporary Experimental gallery. With it she made her first solo exhibition, the multi-channel video installation Skin Shade Night Day (2022). The work was later shown in The National: Australian Art Now at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney in 2023.[1]
She showed Memory House (2022), a series of photographs, together with The Plastic House at Java Creative Cafe, a community arts space in Phnom Penh. It was the first time she had shown her work in Cambodia. She said that audiences there saw the unspoken effects of trauma passed between generations in the work, and connected it to the Khmer Rouge period.[1]
In 2021 Chhorn interviewed the Cambodian-Australian artist Linda Sok for Liminal.[9]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 Liminal, Neha Kale, Interview #215: Allison Chhorn (July 31, 2023)
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 The Adelaide Review, Walter Marsh, Filmmaker Allison Chhorn gives voice to the 'ghosts and traumas' of the Cambodian diaspora (January 17, 2020)
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 Docs in Orbit, Episode 15: The Plastic House with Allison Chhorn (undated)
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 CityMag (InDaily), Family, identity and the Asian-Australian experience in 'The Plastic House' (October 15, 2019)
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 Allison Chhorn, Film (undated)
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 Film at Lincoln Center, The Plastic House, 58th New York Film Festival film page (2020)
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 Melbourne International Film Festival, Lost in the Water, program page (2026)
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 Screen Australia, Blind Body, The Screen Guide entry (undated)
- ↑ Liminal, Allison Chhorn, Interview #175: Linda Sok (May 17, 2021)