FO Cambodia / Happy Ending (Short, Cambodia/USA, w/ Q&A) + Meeting with Pol Pot (Cambodia)
1) Happy Ending
Genre: Drama
Country: USA & Cambodia
Year: 2023
Duration: 17 mins
Director: ELODIE YUNG
Language(s): English
Subtitles: English
Producer: ELODIE YUNG, JONATHAN HOWARD, JASON McLAGAN, MATTHEW KEENE SMITH, MARIE JAMORA
Principal Cast: JASMINE SIM, MARTHA MILLAN, KRISTA MORIN
Synopsis
Like thousands of Asian women seeking a better life for their family, Chenda leaves Cambodia to work in a massage parlor in America. Isolated and without resources, she learns the hard way that her paycheck implies more than a simple massage. But Chenda carries a dark secret that she only shares with her doll... Happy Ending is a neo-noir movie that explores the somber world of an illicit massage parlor through the eyes of a young female immigrant already struggling with grief. How will she react when she is pushed to the brink? Her story is one of revenge. Only because fiction, less brutal than real life, allows us to empower our anti-heroin, offering her a happier closure than reality does.
2) Meeting with Pol Pot
Genre: Drama
Country: France - Cambodia - Taïwan - Qatar - Turkey
Year: 2024
Duration: 112 mins
Director: Rithy Panh
Language(s): French and Cambodian
Subtitles: English
Producer: Catherine Dussart, Rithy Panh, Justine O., Roger Huang, Fatma Hassan Alremaihi, Hanaa Issa, Mehmet Zahid Sobaci, Muhammed Ziyad Varol, Mirsad Purivatra, Jovan Marjanović, Georges-Marc Benamou
Principal Cast: Irène Jacob, Grégoire Colin, Cyril Guei, Bunhok Lim, Somaline Mao
Synopsis
Democratic Kampuchea (Cambodia) - 1978. Three French journalists are invited by the Khmer Rouge to conduct an exclusive interview of the regime’s leader, Pol Pot. The country seems ideal. But behind the
Potemkin village, the Khmer Rouge regime is declining and the war with Vietnam threatens to invade the country. The regime is looking for culprits, secretly carrying out a large scale genocide. Under the eyes of the journalists, the beautiful picture cracks, revealing the horror. Their journey progressively turns into a nightmare. Freely inspired by journalist Elizabeth Becker’s account in When The War Was Over.
Date
Video
Asian World Film Festival
The Asian World Film Festival (AWFF), founded by Kyrgyz public figure Sadyk Sher-Niyaz and overseen by Executive & Program Director Georges N. Chamchoum, brings the very best of a broad selection of Asian World cinema to Los Angeles to draw greater recognition to the region's wealth of filmmakers and strengthen ties between the Asian and Hollywood film industries. Uniting through cross-cultural collaboration, the Festival champions films from over 50 countries across Asia, spanning from Turkey to Japan and from Russia to India and South-East Asia. The Festival is unique in that it predominantly screens Oscar and Golden Globe submissions for Best International Feature Film and Best Motion Picture - Foreign Language respectively. All films that participate in the Festival will have a unique chance to be guided through the challenging awards season and showcased to members of the Motion Picture Academy, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and all Guilds for enhanced exposure, media attention and awards consideration. AWFF is a non-profit organization under Aitysh USA.