Until the Orchid Blooms
Asian Premiere
Polen Ly France, Cambodia 2024 103 min PG
Neang, an indigenous mother in Cambodia, fights to rebuild her life on her ancestral land after it is flooded by a dam reservoir.
Neang is an indigenous woman in northeastern Cambodia whose village has been flooded by a hydroelectric dam. Industrialists collude with the government to pressure the locals to leave their ancestral land, but Neang fights to preserve the unity of her community and family, even as her children’s dreams veer further from traditional ways of life.
Following his short film Further and Further Away, Polen Ly revisits the flooded forest of Stung Treng to record the daily lives and changing lifestyles of the Bunong people. The film documents a long-drawn, controversial hydropower project to dam the Mekong River, and how it is destroying local ecosystems, agriculture and communities.
Shot over six years and significant as a work made by a local, Until the Orchid Blooms is a sensitive and sincere documentary that brings to light an under-explored contemporary issue facing the highland peoples of Cambodia.
Q&A with Filmmaker(s)
29 Nov, Fri 6:30PM / 103 min
Golden Village Cineleisure, Hall 2
AT THE FEST!
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Until the Orchid Blooms
វាសនាផ្កាព្រៃ
Polen Ly
France, Cambodia
2024
Bunong, Khmer
English
103 min
PG
Asian Premiere
Polen Ly
Polen Ly is a Cambodian medical student-turned- filmmaker whose socially conscious works touch on human rights and nature. His short film, Side by Side (2021), won the Youth Jury Prize in Locarno Open Doors. His follow-up, Further and Further Away (2022), bagged Best Performance for actor Bopha Oul at the 33rd SGIFF. Until the Orchid Blooms is his debut documentary feature.
Lucas Sénécaut,
Rithy Panh,
Thibaut Amri
