This article appeared in the June 13, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Sea Within a Sea (Danech San, 2021)

Cambodian filmmaker Danech San completed her short film Sea Within a Sea in 2021 on Koh Sdach (King Island)—an island that’s home to a fishing village known to Cambodians as a non-touristy vacation spot. The film documents the marine conservation efforts of local diver Srenh Sorn as he monitors the Koh Sdach archipelago’s declining seahorse population and coral health amid rapid development. San had always planned on screening the film for the residents of the island. In 2024, while putting the screening together with the film’s production company, independent Cambodian film collective Anti-Archive, she thought of expanding the event’s scope. She enlisted the help of influential Southeast Asian film fund Purin Pictures to organize a three-day festival. Given the lack of cinemas and screening infrastructure on Cambodian islands, the festival aimed to offer screenings of locally made films, both contemporary and classic, as well as filmmaking workshops to islanders who live far away from cultural centers. The first Kampung Film Festival took place in February 2024, drawing large crowds of local residents and enthusiastic student participation in its animation and photography workshops.

The resounding success of that inaugural program meant that the festival has now become an annual event. The second edition took place from February 21–23 earlier this year and brought together the residents of Koh Sdach and nearby islands as well as Thai and Vietnamese coastal islanders from the Gulf of Thailand and members and friends of the organizing committee, who travelled from the capital city of Phnom Penh to Koh Sdach by way of a six-hour bus and boat journey. (I traveled from Singapore at the invitation of the editor-in-chief of MARG1N magazine, Savunthara Seng, who hadn’t stopped talking to me about the festival since he helped organize it last year.) On the first day, attendees gathered at the Seahorse Inn, a guest house that doubled as festival headquarters, before trekking up a small hill, atop which a large, inflatable screen had been set up. The mood was convivial: trees were festooned with neon lights and boisterous children ran through the crowds; nearby, volunteers distributed Monobloc chairs for seating.

The Kampung Film Festival’s imperative to show Cambodian films across time and genre to a local audience is a defiant assertion and reclamation of a lost history. Under the Khmer Rouge regime (1975-1979)—which saw the deaths of up to three million Cambodians and the systematic destruction of all cultural artifacts in pursuit of Year Zero—cinemas were shut down, filmmakers and actors were massacred, and more than 400 films that had been made since the beginnings of the Cambodian film industry in 1960 were either banned, destroyed, or left to rot in the tropical heat by those escaping the regime. According to the new book Remnants of the Past: A Filmography of Early Cambodian Cinema, by scholar Dr. LinDa Saphan and archivist Nate Hun, the dearth of surviving pre-Khmer Rouge–era films in Cambodia has resulted in a lucrative contemporary industry centered on piracy, secrecy, and suspicion, where original reels and rare footage that have survived are sold to the highest bidders.

The book lists some 50 films that have been recovered, albeit in incomplete condition, and cobbled together in the years after the fall of the regime by mysterious private collectors who sought to turn a profit by releasing VHS tapes of damaged 16mm reels. But there is also an international community of cinephiles who’ve strived to find and make these films widely accessible—it includes Hun, who maintains a YouTube channel of Khmer movies and music, and Vathana Huy, who has shared vital firsthand information about the cinema of the era via an influential blog. The opening film of the 2025 Kampung Film Festival, Pel Del Trov Youm (Time to Cry, 1972) by Uong Citta (then known as Uong Kanthouk), was discovered by Davy Chou—co-founder of Anti-Archive and acclaimed director of Return to Seoul (2022)—in Huy’s personal DVD collection while doing research for Golden Slumbers, Chou’s 2011 documentary about Cambodia’s pre-1975 cinematic golden age.

Before escaping to France in 1975, Uong was renowned for her delicate portrayals of courageous and tragic love affairs across six popular feature films. Many of them starred her frequent collaborators, onscreen power couple Kong Som Oeun and Vichara Dany, who portray star-crossed lovers Vichet and Vichara in Pel Del Trov Youm. In the reflexive film, they play actors working in an industry marred by nepotism and corruption. After a meet-cute that finds the daydreaming couple bicycling into a pond, a series of twists proceeds to leave Vichet widowed and Vichara with a broken engagement. The two reunite on a film set to shoot a love story that mirrors their own. In the penultimate scene, their director instructs them to run toward each other on a bridge and hug while the camera zooms into their happy ending. But at the Kampung screening, the movie abruptly cut from Vichet and Vichara running on the bridge to the couple somehow having fallen in the water. It turned out that the moment of their dramatic reunion is one of several scenes missing from the surviving version of the film.

For Uong, who retreated from filmmaking after moving to France, the loss of this exquisite scene was unbearable. In a rare 2021 interview in Saphan’s 2022 book, Faded Reels: The Art of Four Cambodian Filmmakers, Uong said, “It hurts to see the surviving footage with missing frames. I actually prefer to not watch them at all.” But Pel Del Trov Youm was given a new life with the audience at the festival, who didn’t seem to mind these gaps at all: they roared with laughter at the film’s charming slapstick comedy and cheered at its grand romantic turns. In a private conversation after the screening, Chou pointed out that the poor image quality of the DVD suggests that it was likely duplicated from a compressed Video CD that was recorded from VHS tapes, which in turn were probably derived from damaged 16mm reels. The effort devoted to preserving the film through generational format changes is meaningful—it implies that the movie was precious to someone.

Indeed, the ways in which love keeps things—and people—alive seemed to be the thread running through Kampung 2025. In Rithy Panh’s One Evening After the War, which premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes in 1998, a sex worker, Srey Poeuv (Chea Lyda Chan), narrates the life of her lover, Savannah (Narith Roeun). After four years spent fighting the Khmer Rouge in the jungle, Savannah and his friends return from the front on a “death wagon”—a train ferrying those with “nothing to lose” and desperately in search of work into the unforgiving city of Phnom Penh. Savannah works hard to become a successful kickboxer and picks up whatever odd jobs he can at the slaughterhouse, all while courting Srey Poeuv. But nothing goes as planned: his earnings are never enough to support himself, let alone to allow Srey Poeuv to quit her job, and his futile struggles against poverty make him a volatile, often violent lover. When a former comrade proposes a jewelry store heist, Savannah goes along with it, and we learn why Srey Poeuv is telling the story on his behalf: Savannah is gunned down brutally during the failed robbery, leaving Srey Poeuv to raise their child alone. He may be just another casualty of the war and the cycles of violence that persist long after it, yet Srey Poeuv’s recollection of him and their romance emerges as a profound act of love—one that commits Savannah’s struggles to history with extraordinary dignity.

One of the more recent films screened at Kampung was Steve Chen’s stunning debut feature, Dream Land (2015). Lida, played by Lida Duch, is a young real-estate agent. At work, she confidently guides her clients to their aspirational house; off the clock, she indulges in romance comics and love ballads. The problem is her elusive boyfriend can’t commit to anything beyond the pleasant companionship they share whenever they meet. On a trip to the beach town of Kep with her friends, Lida visits a royal house that predates the Khmer Rouge, and says, “I want to erase all of the memories.” While she is moping, a famous jingle commissioned by the Ministry of Tourism in Cambodia, “Ecotourism Marks Kep Glory in History,” plays on the soundtrack, while karaoke-style lyrics appear on-screen: “Kep’s beauty is a gift from the gods . . . The priceless nature keeps tourists here longer.” It’s a moment of wry humor that points to how a site that stands as a relic of Cambodia’s colonial and monarchical past has been commodified as a pretty backdrop for lost young people seeking an escape from their quotidian troubles. In the course of the film, Lida finally recognizes that erasing memories of the past, however difficult they might be, prevents us from living fully in the present.

“Kampung” is Khmer for “dock” and appears in the names of provinces adjacent to the Mekong River. It also means “village” in Malay, and its connotations range from Indigenous dwellings to urban slums across Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. Over decades of rapid urbanization across Southeast Asia, not to mention the spread of ecotourism and vacation resorts in the region, kampungs have steadily disappeared; the term now evokes nostalgia for a bygone era of community and solidarity between neighbors. San, who is currently working on a narrative feature set on Koh Sdach, told me at the festival that there’s a real possibility that the locations she wants to shoot will no longer be there by the time production begins. Amid the change and erasure, the Kampung Film Festival serves as an invigorating tribute to the communal life and shared traditions that keep the past alive, against all odds.

Sasha Han is a film writer and programmer based in Singapore. Her writing has been published by the Asian Film Archive, Documentary Magazine, MARG1N, Mekong Review, MUBI Notebook, and the Singapore Film Society.