Among the four masterclasses, KWAN Kam Pang will share the aesthetics of adaptation, and a 4K restoration of Center Stage will be broadcast during the festival. In addition, director Davy Chou will be the “DIRECTOR IN FOCUS” of this year’s festival, organising a masterclass on how to take Cambodian films to the international arena.
The new “Between Fiction and Reality” section of the festival will feature two films that use fictional images to recreate the real world, including “Myanmar Diaries”, which won Best Documentary at the Berlinale, and “Salute”, which is produced by international director Hou Hsiao-hsien. Mama Dream of Family” is the life story of a group of new immigrant women smuggled into Macau in the 1980s. The film took nine years to complete and was produced by last year’s Focus Director, Zhou Hao.
In recent years, the Venice and Berlin Film Festivals have coincidentally awarded top honors to documentaries, including contemporary personal photography pioneer Nan GOLDIN’s All the Beauty and the Bloodshed and French master Nicolas Philibert’s All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” by Nan Goldin, a pioneer of contemporary contemporary personal photography, and “On the Adamant” by Nicolas Philibert, a French master, will be the opening films of this year’s Festival.
In the “NEW RELEASE” section, the textbook-grade “Subject” traces the lives of five classic documentary characters in and out of the theatre, the meaning of the documentary and the moral controversy; “20 Days in Mariupol”, a reporter who risked his own life to leave behind a cautionary tale of war memories as the war in Ukraine rages on; and “And Miles to Go Before I Sleep”, which tries to reconstruct the story of Vietnamese migrant workers in Taiwan who are being forced into a new life. And Miles to Go Before I Sleep” attempts to reconstruct the truth about the Vietnamese migrants who were shot by the Taiwanese police, and who is the actual perpetrator? Seven Winters in Tehran” and “Smoke Sauna Sisterhood” show that women can be radiant and dynamic even in the darkest of places.
“DIRECTOR IN FOCUS” will screen a number of Davy Chou’s masterpieces, including Return to Seoul, an Oscar nominee for Best International Film, in which Davy Chou breaks away from the stereotypical story of a search for one’s roots, and presents a youthful, engaging account of the collision and restlessness of the quest for identity; a story that is linked to his family’s. The film is also a retelling of the history of Cambodian cinema in the 1960s, Golden Slumbers, a documentary that traces the history of Cambodian cinema in the 1960s, and Diamond Island, a feature-length film that accurately captures the melancholy and contradictions of Cambodian youth in the midst of social transformation.
