Un barrage contre le Pacifique

Samnang faces the demolition of his lifelong home in Phnom Penh coupled with pressures from family, friends, and neighbours, which all arise and intersect at this moment of sudden change.

Binchey, a traditional peasant farmer from Mondulkiri, was expelled from his land – like hundreds of thousands of farmers in Cambodia. He feels powerless in the face of foreign rubber tree plantations spreading across more and more parts of the country. Together with Binchey and other villagers, film director Mehdi Sahebi stages the story of this confiscation of the land and its ramifications.

A nocturnal drive along a rural highway into a city at dawn that is somehow moving in the wrong direction. It is only after a while that you notice that the vehicles are travelling backwards, receding back into the dusk of reality. This mysterious metaphor forms the starting point for a journey into the unknown history of Cambodian film. Nearly 400 films were made in Phnom Penh between 1960 and 1975, only 30 of which survive today. The Khmer Rouge burnt them or allowed them to decay along with many of the country’s studios and cinemas. Most of those involved in the film industry became victims of the genocide. Director Davy Chou, the grandson of one of the most important film producers of the Golden Age’ of Cambodian cinema, uses his film to reconstruct the country’s cinematographic legacy. He goes about his work like an archaeologist, recognising how impossi- ble it is to actually speak to survivors about a life’s work destroyed but not forgotten. LE SOMMEIL D’OR undertakes a painstaking search for fragments of memory in the present, whether in the form of lobby cards, songs on YouTube or a visit to a karaoke bar housed in what used to be a film studio, and gradually coalesces into a strikingly vibrant memorial.

The seven young Cambodian actresses who were chosen to play the main parts of The Rice People were all born during the Khmer Rouge genocide between 1975 and 1979 or under the subsequent occupation. When they are not on the set, they are all practicing the art of choreography between the walls of the former royal palace of Phnom Penh.