In an increasingly media-saturated world, can documentaries still make an impact? A new partnership between Meta House and an international film competition tests the waters in Phnom Penh with a festival of worthy feature lengths and shorts, designed to inspire, inform, and maybe even change the world.
Covering everything from the Puerto Rican trans- community to radical newspapers in Haiti, the 2015 shortlist provides some captivating perspectives into the world’s social dilemmas, and the people who are attempting to tackle them, often at great personal risk.
The Social Impact Media Awards was started in 2012 by LA-based filmmaker Daniela Kon. “[Finalists of] the annual global documentary competition are selected from over 800 entries from 120 countries around the world by our esteemed jury,” Kon says. Cambodia is represented in the competition by Aaron Kisner’s 2013 documentary Vital Voices: Tep Vanny, which examines the work of the charismatic activist for the ex-Boeung Kak Lake community.
SIMA has teamed up with its long-term friend Meta House to create an offshoot of the competition, the six-day film festival SIMA Cambodia. “We created the program for [the festival] around three parameters: the films most relevant and applicable to social and community development in Cambodia; the films most inspiring to change-makers and social-innovators, and; the films that are simply mind-blowing and beautiful, to celebrate a new culture of social documentary cinema at Meta [House].”
Kon says.
The festival features internationally acclaimed films such as One Day After Peace, in which an Israeli woman searches for the Palestinian man who shot her son, and We Are Poets, a look at how British teenagers explore poetry in the digital age. The festival features local talent too: Kalyanee Mam’s documentary A River Changes Course, one of the winners of the 2013 SIMA awards, is to be screened alongside Two Girls Against the Rain, Sopheak Sao’s moving film about two Cambodian women’s long-term romantic relationship. “The topics of displacement and the rights for LGBT members of Cambodian society are vital, and raised with powerful imagery and great integrity in these productions,” Kon says.
German filmmaker and Meta House founder Nicolaus Mesterharm explains the importance of screening these films. “Social issue documentaries can have a significant impact on community organisations, educational institutions, citizens, and policy makers,” he says. “However, 50 percent of the documentary filmmaker’s job is making the movie, and 50 percent is figuring out what its impact can be and how it can move audiences to action.”
SIMA Cambodia is certainly working on the second problem, although Mesterharm also admits that “many Cambodians perceive documentaries as boring,” something he hopes to change via the partnership with SIMA. Even if you’re not looking to have your world shaken, SIMA Cambodia is certainly the place to see the worlds of others.
SIMA Film Festival runs through to Sunday March 1 at Meta House, #37 Sothearos Blvd.