The closest thing to Thailand in Cannes this year is, once again, Cambodia. Last year, Rithy Panh arrived at the festival with moving Khmer Rouge documentary The Missing Picture, which went on to win the Un Certain Regard prize and be nominated for an Oscar. This year, at the sidebar Directors’ Fortnight section, Paris-based Davy Chou presents his 21-minute film Cambodia 2099, a rapt, fluid record of the dreams-in-construction that is present-day Phnom Penh.
Cambodia 2099, a short film showing in Cannes this year.
The story, which Chou wrote quickly in a mere five days, takes place entirely on an artificial island called Koh Pich — Diamond Island — a huge social-welfare project in the Cambodian capital. Amidst the newly built condominiums and construction sites, two young men meet every evening to tell each other the dreams they had the night before. One of them keeps dreaming that he can time-travel to Cambodia in 2099, while the other has a recurring nightmare about the 1997 political clashes in that country. Early on, a radio announcer tells us that a general election is due to be held in Cambodia a few days hence and thus the narrative is precisely framed within a specific place and time.
“Diamond Island has always fascinated me,” says Chou. “There you can see modern buildings and apartments blocks, and those are very new to Cambodia. Soon there will also be shopping areas and amusement parks. It’s the image of the future — and it’s willing to be the future of Cambodia.”
Chou is a Parisian of Cambodian origin. His grandfather was a well-known movie producer in mid-20th-century Cambodia, and the young film-maker’s first work was the documentary Golden Slumbers, a thorough and inventive chronicle of the Khmer film industry in its heyday before the Khmer Rouge marched into the capital and spoiled the party back in the 1970s (Golden Slumbers has been shown in Thailand a few times over the past two years). In Phnom Penh last year to research a new project of his, Chou got tired of rewriting and awaiting financing for a feature-length film he is planning, and decided to do something quick and spontaneous. The result was Cambodia 2099, which is a mix of social observation, love story and a quirky, teasing look at young Cambodians’ fluency in the new digital media.
“I want to make a very present and very digital film, with nods to Asian drama, manga and karaoke videos,” Chou explains. “The starting image for me , however, was when I noticed two guys sitting by the riverfront on Diamond Island and talking. They talked for a whole hour and I couldn’t hear what was it all about. But that got me thinking.
“The film mentioned the election [which took place earlier this year] because I was in Phnom Penh when the campaigning started. In the film, I didn’t want to make a strong statement about that, but I tried to catch the spirit I felt [from being in the city] at that time. There was a special atmosphere that I felt. Excitement and hope, yes, but also worry. Everybody was saying that Cambodia was quite peaceful compared to the past. And a lot of young people are more politically committed, which is something very new. But among all this, the sense of worry is there, too.”
On Diamond Island Chou believes that he has seen the embodiment of what the future, however uncertain, might bring for a new generation of Cambodians. In the film, the image of young men and women riding around the island on their motorcycles, gazing at all the new buildings being erected, serves to capture that spirit.
“That’s the place where young people go to dream,” Chou says. “And I’m trying to understand what it’s all about.”
