Karmalink (2022)

Direction: Jake Wachtel
Country: Cambodia / USA

Jake Wachtel’s feature debut, Karmalink, is a smoothly conducted and acceptably performed Cambodian tale  that trades fire for smoke as the story evolves. Still, it's a bold combination of advanced technology, reincarnation, gentrification, and teen treasure-hunt adventure.

Mounted with lightness and grace, the story follows Leng Heng (Leng Heng Prak), a 13-year-old boy who dreams about his past lives. Those vivid dreams always bring to consciousness a missing Buddhist relic that he’s determined to find out. That powerful idea seems bigger than himself, but for that purpose, he joins forces with his best friend, Srey Leak (Srey Leak Chhith), an independent, recently homeless young girl with acute detective instincts. 

Between an embarrassing naivety and beautiful narrative intentions, the film is bold in the concept but a bit timid in the result. It turns out to be visually interesting, honorably fulfilling the specifications of good entertainment, and yet, the dynamics are not without ups and downs. It can still be engaging, especially due to a curious futuristic setting defined by a mix of mundane and unworldly elements. The key here is to keep things moving without letting the complications weigh down the intentional direction of the story. 

Karmalink has other great things besides its title: it’s Cambodia’s first sci-fi film, with an apt direction, and Robert Leitzell's top cinematography guaranteeing a spot-on control of color and light.

The Missing Picture (2013)

Directed by: Rithy Panh
Country: Cambodia / France

Movie Review: Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh exposes once again the atrocities and terrifying atmosphere imposed by the authoritarian communist regime Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, between 1975 and 1979 in Cambodia. Looking in vain for a missing photograph taken in that time by Khmer Rouge, evincing mass murder, Panh resolves to narrate his own story, at the same time that recreates in an artsy way – through scenarios composed by clay dolls and the use of new and old footage - the impure and corrupt environment of Phnom Penh, where poor common people, capitalists, and intellectuals were eradicated and destroyed. The film starts with a big close-up of Panh’s hands carving clay to shape a little figure that symbolizes his father, a dignified man who starved to death as protest against the inhuman conditions lived in those killing fields. The scene then shifts to footage where we can see children submitted to forced labor, sick people who lost their dignitiy, and deep misery in every sense. The creative scenarios mingled with harrowing images of a sad reality, left me with an unexplainable sensation – almost like hypnotized by the narrator’s melancholic voice, absorbed by Panh’s beautiful creativity, and furious with what these innocent people had to suffer. Not so blunt or striking as the ‘Indonesian’ “The Act of Killing”, “The Missing Picture” shows personal sensibility and grief. Rithy Panh showed to be confident behind the camera and his panning shots prove what he wanted to: ‘a picture can be stolen but a thought cannot’.