Spotlight on Cambodian Films in Mumbai Film Festival : Who am I

"Where I Go" (2012) 


Director: Neang Kavich
 Country: Cambodia


 

This year MAMI has special section on Combodian Films. Frankly speaking, I never thought that this small far east Asian  war torn country may have any significance on world film map. But today when I saw this documentary directed by Neang Kavich , I was compelled to change my opinion.

This documentary is about children born out of holy or unholy martial alliance between uniformed officers/ men of United States Peace Keeping Forces with local women. San Pattica is such a child, a mixed Cambodian-Cameroonian son, his father came to work in Cambodia in 1992-1993, during a period of the first election in Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge regime collapsed. Since his father left country for many years, Pattica was raised by his grandmother. However, grandma was forced to bring Pattica to study and live in an orphanage in Phnom Penh.

I met with Kavich after the show. He is hardly 26 years, he has hats of director, cameraman but in his age his work is very matured and compelling. He says that it took him months of trawling through the rubbish-strewn fringes of Boeung Kak lake, past makeshift squats and rubbish dumps, to find San Pattica’s mother.Then 17 and living in an orphanage, he had never met and knew little of his father, a former UNTAC soldier from Cameroon, who had left Cambodia not long after the early 90s elections.

After a lifetime of taunts and discrimination based on the colour of his skin, he yearned to meet his father, and for a fuller sense of identity.

It was the intimate discussions Pattica had with young filmmaker Neang Kavich, who he met when both were in a Lakhaon Kaol performance (a traditional masked dance) that prompted him to dig deeper.

The pair went on a search for his mother, who had appeared sporadically throughout his childhood, primarily when looking for money for drugs, in hope of finding some answers about his father.

That search was one of many hardships Kavich captured on film after he began to document Pattica’s story in 2011. He filmed their long walks through Boeung Kak. He shot bus trips with Pattica’s fellow students at the orphanage and captured the jeers and taunts the teenager faced (“you’re black to the bone,” and “you look like a monkey”) as well as conversations with Pattica’s grandmother and his younger sister, Nana. The film ends with Pattica writing a passionate letter addressed to Ban Ki Moon, UN Secretary General to help him in finding his father.With a shot of plane flying over the cityscape the film ends but left us to think for about this human issue.   




Young director Neang , is from  Phnom Penh, Cambodia, he majored from  Limkokwing University in Professional Graphic Design. Kavich was first exposed to traditional Khmer arts through the Cambodian Living Arts organization and has studied folk and classical Khmer dance over the past seven years. From 2007 until 2009, He had been a full-time, salaried intern at Cambodian Living Arts’ Recording Studio where he was an assistant to the studio engineers. During year 2008, Kavich had the opportunity to perform in England and Scotland with his dance class for the WOMAD and Edinburgh Arts Festivals.

Then in 2008, he started making his short film called “Dancing in the Building” where he has been living and learning Cambodian traditional dance. In 2009, Kavich attended a documentary workshop and directed the short film “SMOT”. In 2010, Kavich was selected by Rithy Panh’s film workshop in which he produced another short film ”A Scale Boy”. And in 2012  Kavich completed his  first full length documentary “ Where I go?” , a co-production between FICA (International Film Festival of Asian Cinema) of Vesoul (France) and Bophana in Cambodia.