Category: Night & Day

THURSDAY 17 |Bored with w  conventional poetry recitals so snobbish almost no one in the audience was listening, Chicago-born Marc Kelly Smith – a self-described socialist who had been writing verse since the age of 19 – executed a dramatic ‘up yours’ to the literary establishment  in 1984 with the launch of the world’s first poetry slam. A departure from the naval-gazing norm of genteel readings, the slam injected an element of fierce competition: poets performed; cheering (or booing) onlookers acted as judge, jury and execution. In September 1992, when Smithsonian magazine covered the poetry slam phenomenon, the reporter described Smith as “almost visionary on the need to rescue poetry from its lowly status in the nation’s cultural life”. The spoken word revolution had begun. It would take a further three decades for the movement sparked by ‘Slam Papi’ to reach Cambodian shores, but when it did – in the form of US deportee Kosal Khiev, a Cambodia-born convict who discovered poetry while serving time for attempted murder – it carried with it the necessary tinder to light a new, more local revolution. In a culture where creative self-expression remains largely an alien concept, Kosal and fellow spoken word artists Kaztet Dee, Poet G and Myley Rattle are uniting for one very special performance.

WHO: Kosal Khiev, Kaztet Dee, Poet G and Myley Rattle
WHAT: Poetry slam
WHERE: Show Box, Street 330 & 113
WHEN: 7:30pm April 17
WHY: “The very word ‘poetry’ repels people. Why is that? Because of what schools have done to it. The slam gives it back to the people… We need people to talk poetry to each other. That’s how we communicate our values, our hearts, the things that we’ve learned that make us who we are.” – Marc Smith

TUESDAY 15 |Full moon? Check. Beach? Check. Party? Don’t ask stupid questions. Flee the capital for a night and let DJs Simon C Vent, Funkelastiks, Flo, Egospell and Wez-T take you on a sonic EDM trip to the tiny isle of Koh Rong Saloeum. Tickets cost $25 and the boat leaves Serendipity Pier, in Sihanoukville, at 5pm. Hairy palms not included. ArrOOOOOO!

WHO: DJs Simon C Vent, Funkelastiks, Flo, Egospell and Wez-T
WHAT: Full Moon Party
WHERE: Koh Rong Saloeum island
WHEN: 5pm April 15
WHY: I see a bad moon rising…

 

SUNDAY 13 |When veteran director Werner Herzog describes a film as the most “powerful, surreal and frightening in at least a decade”, you know you’d better steel your nerves before the opening credits start to roll. The Act Of Killing, for which Herzog later signed on as executive producer, isn’t the imagined stuff of nightmare peddlers Eli Roth or Quentin Tarantino; it’s actual documented history, which is what makes its horrors that much harder to bear. First-time director Joshua Oppenheimer deals not in fiction but in fact. Eight years, 25 awards and one very surreal journey ago, he set out to make a documentary about ‘the second-greatest crime of the 20th century’: the Indonesian killings of 1965-66, in which gangsters hired by General Suharto’s military dictatorship systematically tortured and murdered more than half a million people. And it was to those responsible for these mass murders in northern Sumatra that Oppenheimer went with an indecent proposal: re-enact the killings you committed, on camera, in the style of your favourite movie genre. Absurd it may sound, but the resulting 157 minutes of footage – edited down from thousands of hours gathered by Oppenheimer and his crew in situ between 2005 and 2011 – are among the most disturbing you will ever see.

WHO: First-time director Joshua Oppenheimer
WHAT: The Act Of Killing screening
WHERE: Empire, #30 Street 130.
WHEN: 4pm April 13
WHY: “Raw, terrifying, and painfully difficult to watch, The Act Of Killing offers a haunting testament to the edifying, confrontational power of documentary cinema.” – rottentomatoes.com

 

SATURDAY 12 |Once upon a time, or 2001 to be exact, the Dutchman behind The Flicks Community Movie Houses in Phnom Penh wasn’t known as the godfather of couch surfing. Global media had yet to brand him ‘The world’s biggest freeloader’ (he still prefers ‘economic refugee’) and the concept of social networking hadn’t even been invented. Ramon Stoppelenburg, then a journalism student in his mid-20s, wanted to travel the world. There was only one catch: his wallet was so empty it echoed. Enter the blossoming technology we now know as The Internet. Letmestayforaday.com was Ramon’s domain. His mission: to boldly go where no man (or woman) had gone before and traverse the globe for free, simply by hopping – based on invitations he received online – from sofa to sofa. By December 2001, both the Guardian and Sunday Times newspapers in the UK had declared him Internet Personality of the Year. Two years and 10,000 new friends later, Ramon – who features in the documentary One Couch At A Time – had become the poster boy for what academics and lefties now loftily refer to as the ‘sharing economy’.

WHO: Couchsurfers and other open-minded hipster types
WHAT: One Couch At A Time screening
WHERE: Flicks2, Street 136
WHEN: 2pm April 12
WHY: The new ‘age of sharing’ examined

FRIDAY 11 & 12|Ian Anderson, bleached-blond frontman from Stiff Little Punks and Lazy Drunks, is back! During the ‘80s, before he quit the UK, Anderson’s Leicester-based band Crazyhead had opened for none other than Iggy Pop, The Cult, the Ramones and the Sex Pistols. Singer of everything ‘from trenchant social commentary to the surreal, but always with an underlying vein of black humour’, Anderson is back from his new Thai home for two nights of noise only. Did he have any idea, during the ‘70s, that punk rock would prove so enduring? “No, I’m pleasantly surprised. I didn’t know what to think. I thought by the year 2000 we’d all be flying around on spaceship skateboards and wearing silver suits…”

WHO: Ian Anderson with Stuff Little Punks and Lazy Drunks
WHAT: Punk, innit?!
WHERE: Sharky Bar, Street 130
WHEN: 9pm April 11 & 12
WHY: Punk’s not dead, it just needed a nap!

FRIDAY 11 |Kerry Hamill was 27 when he wrote his last journal entry from his yacht Foxy Lady in August 1978. The eldest son of a tight-knit New Zealand family, he – along with fellow travellers Stuart Glass, a Canadian, and John Dewhirst from England – would within weeks join the handful of foreigners executed by the Khmer Rouge. At the time, few people outside Cambodia knew of the atrocities being committed within. Before Foxy Lady’s course was forever altered, Kerry had sent countless letters back home, regaling his family with breathless tales. Suddenly, the letters stopped. The silence was deafening. It would be a further 18 months before the Hamills finally discovered what awful fate had befallen their son. Thirty-one years later, on the same day Kerry’s yacht had first strayed into Cambodian waters, his younger brother Rob – an Olympic and Trans-Atlantic rowing champion – arrived in Phnom Penh to confront Kerry’s killers at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. At the same time, he agreed to the filming of Brother Number One, an award-winning documentary by Annie Goldson, James Bellamy and Peter Gilbert that follows Rob as he retraces Kerry’s final steps. Along the way he visits Tuol Sleng, where his brother was tortured; meets three S-21 survivors, and penetrates a Khmer Rouge stronghold to find the Navy officer in charge when Kerry’s yacht was attacked. The resulting film is “the story of an innocent man brought to his knees and killed in the prime of his life, and the impact his death had on just one family”.

WHO: Rob Hamill
WHAT: Brother Number One screening
WHERE: Meta House, #37 Sothearos Blvd.
WHEN: 4pm April 11
WHY: The ghost of the Khmer Rouge confronted

TUESDAY 8 | Filmed in Cambodia, France and England, director Alan Canner’s The Cross And The Bodhi Tree explores Christian encounters with Buddhism by interweaving the bustle and antiquities of Buddhist Cambodia with the serenity of an English convent. The documentary depicts the spiritual journeys of a French Catholic priest who has worked in Cambodia since 1965 and an Anglican nun who lives a life of silence and prayer at a convent in Oxford. Father François Ponchaud, a member of the Foreign Missions of Paris, has translated the Bible into Khmer and written the definitive history of the Catholic Church in Cambodia. In 1977, he wrote Cambodia Year Zero – the book that alerted the world to the horrors of the Pol Pot regime. Mother Rosemary has long nurtured an interest in Buddhism and in 1991 spent two months at a Buddhist monastery. Both have had to face questions posed by the head-on collision of two belief systems, and their answers – direct, lucid and humble – result in a film that is as thought-provoking as it is profound.

WHO: The spiritually inclined
WHAT: The Cross And The Bodhi Tree screening
WHERE: Meta House, #37 Sothearos Blvd.
WHEN: 7pm April 8
WHY: Witness what happens when two belief systems collide

 

SUNDAY 6 | When veteran director Werner Herzog describes a film as the most “powerful, surreal and frightening in at least a decade”, you know you’d better steel your nerves before the opening credits start to roll. The Act Of Killing isn’t the imagined stuff of nightmare-peddlers Eli Roth or Quentin Tarantino; it’s documented history, which is what makes its horrors so hard to bear. Director Joshua Oppenheimer deals not in fiction but in fact. Eight years, 25 awards and one very surreal journey ago, he set out to make a documentary about ‘the second-greatest crime of the 20th century’: the Indonesian killings of 1965-66, in which gangsters hired by General Suharto’s military dictatorship systematically tortured and murdered more than half a million people. And it was to those responsible for these mass murders in northern Sumatra that Oppenheimer went with an indecent proposal: re-enact the killings you committed, on camera, in the style of your favourite movie genre. Absurd it may sound, but the resulting 157 minutes of footage – edited down from thousands of hours gathered by Oppenheimer and his crew in situ between 2005 and 2011 – are among the most disturbing you will ever see.

WHO: Indonesia’s death squads
WHAT: The Act Of Killing screening
WHERE: Meta House, #37 Sothearos Blvd.
WHEN: 8pm April 6
WHY: “Raw, terrifying, and painfully difficult to watch, The Act Of Killing offers a haunting testament to the edifying, confrontational power of documentary cinema.” – rottentomatoes.com

 

SUNDAY 6 | The scenes from Phnom Penh Streets revel in the everyday details of life, the ubiquitous urban streetscapes that typically whiz past at the speed of a carefree moto. Old men play unfamiliar board games. A young man buys a bowl of noodles from a roving street seller. A motorcycle repairman relaxes against a cacophony of spare parts. The exhibit represents the work of photographers Jeff Perigois and Jason Waste, working under the rubric Downtown Collective. In all, 30 prints were selected from a trove of more than 400 images. Perigois works in sepia tones, Waste in black and white. Like the old repairman with new tyres to sell, Phnom Penh Streets peddles goods of similar import. In a young girl’s eyes we are made to consider biographies we’d might rather dismiss. In the grin of an old man we find humanity. And if we’re lucky, maybe more.

WHO: Downtown Collective
WHAT: Phnom Penh Streets photo exhibition opening
WHEN: 6pm April 6
WHERE: Equinox, #3a Street 278
WHY: Examine life in close-up

 

FRIDAY 4 | It can be painfully obvious in everyday life, but portraying corruption is easier said than done. Elizabeth Johnson, of Transparency International Cambodia, stresses the need for anonymity among photographers in a new exhibition exploring the issue. “The primary target group for this is young Cambodians. Given the latest UN figures, 65% of the population is under the age of 30 so we see young people here as the agents of change. Because corruption is on all levels of society, we want to get more people talking and thinking and changing existing structures. We saw this as a fun and creative way to get people to do this. We write reports and present them in a particular way and they’ll be read by policymakers and students, but in a way they’re not going to reach out to everybody. A photographic representation – and art – can engage people in different ways. It can be an agent that can cause reflection for change.” Pisal Poch, an intern with the organisation, first learned about the concept during an economics course. “I started to see how society works… and how the distribution of welfare affects everyone. I could see tiny loopholes: looking at the definitions of corruption, it’s all about the way people use their power to take the welfare of people without power. I started to see the root of the problem of most of the society. I think, as one of the younger generation, if we don’t do anything to minimise this issue it will probably be worse for my sons and grandsons. We’re trying to represent the negative effect because it’s allowing people to visualise their own understanding of corruption in their environment. That’s one of the reasons: the connection between the photograph itself and how to get people to understand corruption.”

WHO: The ethically sound
WHAT: The Negative Effects Of Corruption In Cambodia photo exhibition opening
WHERE: Meta House, #37 Sothearos Blvd.
WHEN: 6:30pm April  4
WHY: “The duty of youth is to challenge corruption.” – Kurt Cobain