Organization

Bophana Center

មជ្ឈមណ្ឌលធនធានសោតទស្សន៍បុប្ផាណា

The Bophana Center (មជ្ឈមណ្ឌលធនធានសោតទស្សន៍បុប្ផាណា) is an audiovisual archive in Phnom Penh. Its full name is the Bophana Audiovisual Resource Center. It gathers film, television, photographs and sound recordings about Cambodia from around the world, and the public may use them free of charge.[1][2] The filmmakers Rithy Panh and Ieu Pannakar founded it, and it opened on December 4, 2006.[1][3]

History

The upper floors of a white building with balconies and louvred windows, seen above a screen of green trees.
The Bophana Center building on Street 200, Phnom Penh, 2022. Photo: Synat Chan, CC BY-SA 4.0

In the early 1990s, while making his first documentaries in Cambodia, Rithy Panh saw how much of the country's film and sound heritage had been lost or was at risk.[3] Rithy Panh recalls that Ieu Pannakar, one of the first Cambodian filmmakers, had begun collecting old films left lying in the cities and their streets after the fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979. In 1990 Rithy Panh and his friends came upon the collection, kept in the roof of the cinema department in Phnom Penh. They had no training as archivists and worked as volunteers, and it took ten years for the center to take shape.[1] The Angkor Database describes Ieu Pannakar as a senator and Minister of the Royal Palace, who had run the state's broadcasting and cinema services from 1955 to 1970.[4]

The Cambodian government gave the project a 1960s building in the city center, which was brought back to its first design in 2006, and French institutions gave technical and financial support.[3] The Hello Angkor guide names the French National Audiovisual Institute among them.[5]

The center takes its name from Bophana, a young woman held by the Khmer Rouge at the S-21 prison.[1] In the center's words, the name carries forward what her letters and life story left behind: a message of struggle, courage and dignity.[3] Rithy Panh told her story in his 1996 film Bophana: A Cambodian Tragedy.[5]

In its first years the center trained archivists, built its own search database, called Hanuman, dubbed films into Khmer and held screenings around the country. It joined the International Federation of Film Archives in the same period.[3] It also helped set up the Cambodia Film Commission, which opened on July 16, 2009.[3]

Collections

The center's holdings, the Bophana Center Archive, include one of Gabriel Veyre's first films, made in the late nineteenth century for the Lumière brothers. The collections also hold newsreels from the 1960s, radio recordings and Khmer Rouge propaganda films.[6] The Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), a partner, lists colonial-era newsreels by Gaumont Pathé, footage of traditional Cambodian ballet that has been used to revive dances, and feature films of the 1960s and early 1970s.[7] Its sound and object collections include photographs, film posters and records of singers such as Sinn Sisamouth, Ros Sereysothea, Pen Ran and Huoy Meas.[7]

The archivists write a full description of each document in Khmer, English and French, and the center can digitize documents and restore films when needed. The center doesn't keep donated originals unless asked to: it digitizes them and gives them back to their owners.[6]

Visitors watch the archives on site, during opening hours.[6] With a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2020 and 2021, the center chose 300 of the 2,000 hours of its archive still waiting for preservation. They included footage of Cambodia in 1990 and documentaries of the 1990s from the archive of UNICEF, the United Nations children's agency. The center digitized them for public use.[8][6]

Programs

Hello Angkor lists the center's three goals as archiving, creation and training.[5] It runs training for young Cambodians in film, television and new media.[3] Hello Angkor dates the center's mobile screenings in the provinces to 2008.[5] With the Cambodia Film Commission, the center has held the Cambodia International Film Festival since 2010.[5]

Screenings and exhibitions

Cine Saturday shows films from the center's archive and from private collections every Saturday at 5 p.m. in its own theater. Entry is free, and directors often come to talk with the audience. The Cine Club is for young Cambodians who love film: a guest presents each film from abroad or at home and leads a discussion, and the club sometimes runs short courses in film work such as scriptwriting.[9] On its mobile tours, the center screens films in a village's town square, school yard or pagoda, and the films are picked with partners and the people of each community.[9] It also holds talks on Cambodian history, culture and architecture, and exhibitions built on its collections.[9]

Some exhibitions also run online. In 2020 "Sound of Phloy" followed the phloy, a rarely heard instrument, in the Areng area of Koh Kong province; Cambodian Living Arts organized it through its Khmer Magic Music Bus, with the center and a local ecotourism community.[10] In July 2021 "Remembering Cambodian Border Camps, 40 Years Later" showed Colin Grafton's 1980 photographs of the refugee camps on the Thai border, online and at the center.[11] In September 2021, with his family, the center put online 11 black-and-white drawings by the painter Vann Nath, a survivor of S-21, the prison at Tuol Sleng.[12]

Training projects

Much of the training runs as funded projects. A three-year grant of US$500,000 from the Henry Luce Foundation paid for training young Cambodian filmmakers from 2022 to 2025, along with exchanges between Cambodian and American institutions.[13] From November 2021 to October 2022, "Visualizing the Mekong" had young people make documentaries about the Mekong, funded by the Swedish and Swiss development agencies with support from BBC Media Action.[14]

With the Cambodia Indigenous Peoples Organization, the center gave full scholarships to 24 indigenous young people aged 18 to 30 from Ratanakiri and Mondulkiri, from April 2022 to December 2023. They trained in documentary filmmaking and multimedia in Banlung, and their films are made in indigenous languages to help keep those languages alive.[15]

The center lists documentaries by young Cambodians it trained among its main productions, shown at festivals including Sundance. One of them, Red Wedding, won the medium-length documentary award at the 2012 International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam.[16]

In 2019 ACMI's preservation team spent a week at the center, sharing digitization skills under a partnership funded by the Australian government's Australia-ASEAN Council.[7]

The center is at 64 Street 200 in Phnom Penh.[6]

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Documentary (International Documentary Association), Frako Loden, Rithy Panh: Film Preservation and the Importance of Memory (November 19, 2014)
  2. ↑ Bophana Center, home page in Khmer (undated)
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 Bophana Center, Our History (undated)
  4. ↑ Angkor Database, Bophana Center (undated)
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 Hello Angkor, Bophana Center (updated January 1, 2026)
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 Bophana Center, Archives (undated; figures for June 2020)
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 ACMI, Candice Cranmer, Julia Murphy and Nick Richardson, ACMI and Bophana: preserving Cambodia's fragile stories (October 30, 2019)
  8. ↑ Bophana Center, Preservation and Accessibility of Audiovisual Archives of Cambodia (undated)
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 Bophana Center, Events (undated)
  10. ↑ Bophana Center, Sound of Phloy (September 23, 2020)
  11. ↑ Bophana Center, Remembering Cambodian Border Camps, 40 Years Later (July 1, 2021)
  12. ↑ Bophana Center, 10th Anniversary of painter VANN Nath's memories (September 5, 2021)
  13. ↑ Bophana Center, Training tomorrow's film directors and promoting academic and cultural exchange through Cambodia's filmmaking (undated)
  14. ↑ Bophana Center, Visualizing the Mekong: Stimulating Youth's Participation and Engagement (undated)
  15. ↑ Bophana Center, Press Release on the Implementation of the Project the Arts of Visibility and Positive Social Change (undated)
  16. ↑ Bophana Center, Production (undated)
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This page was last edited on 16 October 2026, at 23:32.