Cinema of Cambodia

On this page

1. Beginnings
2. Golden age
3. Khmer Rouge years
4. Revival
5. See also
6. References

On this page

1. Beginnings
2. Golden age
3. Khmer Rouge years
4. Revival
5. See also
6. References

Illustration of a 1960s picture-palace cinema front in Phnom Penh. It shows no real cinema, poster or film.

The cinema of Cambodia flourished from 1960 to 1975, nearly ended under the Khmer Rouge, and has been rebuilt since the 1980s.

Beginnings

Under French rule, films in Cambodia were made almost only by French settlers, most of them documentaries about their own work. The program of the 2012 Berlin film festival Forum credits Som Sam Al with the first feature shot by a Cambodian, in 1958, on silent black-and-white 16-millimeter film. New Mandala gives 1960 as the year of the first full-length Khmer feature, so the sources date the first feature differently.

Until sound equipment reached the country in the middle of the 1960s, films were shown silent. Narrators in the hall spoke the dialogue and added sound effects and music, at times for five showings of one film in a day, and some became stars in their own right.

Golden age

The years from 1960 to 1975 are remembered as the golden age of Cambodian film. The French director Marcel Camus shot L'oiseau de paradis (1963) in Cambodia with untrained local actors. Yvon Hem, a production assistant on the film, went on with his sister Narie to found the studio Baksey Thansour ("Bird of Paradise"). Most films of the period retold Khmer legends or Buddhist stories such as the Jatakas. Hem's Sovannah Hong (1968) and Sovan Pancha (1970) drew large crowds. Melodramas and comedies followed from the mid-1960s.

The Forum sheet singles out Ly Bun Yim, a self-taught director with his own studio in Phnom Penh, whose two surviving films are fantasies full of violence and wonders. The sheet adds that the actor Dy Saveth is said to have appeared in more than 100 films, and that Phnom Penh had more than thirty cinemas. New Mandala counts 30 cinemas in the city and names Kong Sam Oeun, Vichara Dany, Nop Nem and Chea Yuthorn among the best-known actors. The singer Sinn Sisamouth wrote the music for many films.

Norodom Sihanouk, head of state from independence in 1953, backed the industry and made films himself. Before the coup of 1970 removed him, he shot eight features and several documentaries, and he took up film projects again in exile and after his return in 1992. In his own account, his films were also meant to teach Cambodians in the countryside about Khmer history and customs.

Khmer Rouge years

The war of the early 1970s reached the film business. Shooting in the provinces was at times broken off by attacks, and at the end of 1974 the cinemas of Phnom Penh closed after bombings in public places. After the Khmer Rouge took the capital on April 17, 1975, they banned films and shut the theatres. The films they made themselves were mostly short, silent propaganda documentaries.

The Forum sheet names Sinn Sisamouth, Ros Sereysothea, Kong Sam Oeun, Ly Va and Vichara Dany among the actors, musicians and other artists killed under the Khmer Rouge. Many films were burned or left to rot with the studios and cinemas.

Sources differ on how many films were made and how many survive. The Forum sheet gives nearly 400 films from 1960 to 1975 with 30 surviving, and elsewhere about 450. A 2017 program from the University of the Arts London also gives 400 films and 30 survivors, and adds that most of the old cinemas of Phnom Penh became restaurants, karaoke clubs or squats. The Khmer service of Voice of America gives more than 400 films and 35 survivors.

Revival

After January 1979 no films were made in Cambodia for some years, and films from before the Khmer Rouge were banned from screens. Yvon Hem, who had survived as a farm worker, built a camera rig from old parts and shot Sror Mori Anthakal (Shadow of Darkness, 1987), the first feature after the Khmer Rouge period. Around 1990 an estimated 200 films were shot on the first video cameras, and none of them appears to survive.

Thai films and television dramas took much of the market in the 1990s, until the unrest of 2003 drove them out. Local output then fell from 35 films in 2007 to 25 in 2008 and 13 in 2009. By the sheet's estimate, probably fewer than ten were made in each of 2010 and 2011, most of them low-budget horror. In 2012 New Mandala described the Cambodia Film Commission as running workshops, bringing foreign shoots to the country and holding the Cambodia International Film Festival. Its chief executive, Cedric Eloy, said in 2014 that the number of experienced crew members had grown from about 40 in 2009 to over 160.

The director Rithy Panh founded the Bophana Center in Phnom Penh in 2006 with the filmmaker Ieu Pannakar. It gathers film, television, photo and sound archives on Cambodia, opens them to visitors free of charge, and trains young filmmakers. Panh's The Missing Picture, which tells his family's story under the Khmer Rouge with clay figures, won the top prize of the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes in 2013. It became the first Cambodian film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

Davy Chou, the grandson of the golden-age producer Van Chann, revisited the lost films in his documentary Golden Slumbers (2011), which was shown at the Busan International Film Festival.

See also

• Cambodia
• A River Changes Course