Collection

Bophana Center Archive

The Bophana Center Archive is the collection of Cambodian film, radio, photography and music held by the Bophana Audiovisual Resource Center in Phnom Penh.[1] The center preserves the material and opens it to visitors.[1]

A bright room with wooden reading tables and benches, tall bookshelves along the walls and windows with patterned grilles.
The archive consultation space at the Bophana Center, Phnom Penh, 2022.

History

The filmmaker Rithy Panh founded the Bophana Center with Ieu Pannakar, and it opened in Phnom Penh on December 4, 2006.[2][3] Training young Cambodians as archivists, film technicians and filmmakers was a main aim from the beginning, and the center also produces its own documentaries.[2][3]

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.

Overview

The archive brings together Cambodian material from the French National Audiovisual Institute, the UNICEF archive, Rithy Panh's own archive and the Cambodian Film Commission, which recovered Khmer Rouge propaganda films from 1979 onward. Its subjects run from Cambodian cinema and the newsreels of the 1960s to radio, classical dance, religion and tradition, Cambodian women, Phnom Penh and daily life.[1]

A small room with tiered red benches facing a screen area, dark curtains on the wall and a white plastic chair.
The screening room at the Bophana Center, Phnom Penh, 2022.

Material coverage

The collections listed as of June 2020 take in films, newsreels, radio programs, vinyl records, photo series and filmed interviews.[1]

One preservation project, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and running from 2020 to 2021, selected 300 hours of the archive's remaining 2,000 hours for digitization, among it rare footage of Cambodia from 1990, an interview with a senior Khmer Rouge officer and UNICEF documentaries from the 1990s.[1] The project also paid for a server and storage array, digitization equipment and a backup system for the whole archive collection.[1]

Catalog and access

Individual items are described in the center's Archives Online catalog, which names contributing collections such as the Thonevath Pou collection.[4] The center gives the public free access to its archives.[2]

Selected recordings

References 4
  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 Bophana Center archives
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Bophana Audiovisual Resource Center, About Bophana Center
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Leslie Barnes, 'The Image of a Quest': The Visual Archives of Rithy Panh, Australian Humanities Review (August 1, 2016)
  4. ↑ Bophana Archives Online, Cambodian Music of Forest
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This page was last edited on 22 October 2026, at 03:57.