“It was 1974, war had lasted for years…” So begins the memory of an old Chinese man who lived through the regime of the Khmer Rouge led by the Communist Party of Cambodia. The tightly controlled Cambodian media left very few images between 1975 and 1979. This was a time when millions of people died unnecessarily and about 200,000 were people of Chinese descent. Guangli Liu’s film is a collective imagination of that lost history based on propaganda videos and the disaster videos which spread throughout the world after the fall of the Khmer Rouge. Narrated through the autobiographical voice, a tender, personal history unfurls as a virtual reality of an imagined recent past. Detailing the human condition and traumas of the dispossessed. The contrast between the archive footage and the 3D reconstruction shows the role of the experimental digital as it interweaves memory with history into the universal of being human.
- Year2020
- Runtime21 minutes
- LanguageChinese
- CountryFrance
- PremiereChicago Premiere
- ProducerGuylaine Huet
- FilmmakerGuangli Liu
- EditorIsmaël Joffroy Chandoutis, Léo Guillaume, Yuyan Wang
- Sound DesignMartin Delzescaux, Inoa Kan
- MusicYoann Helynck
“It was 1974, war had lasted for years…” So begins the memory of an old Chinese man who lived through the regime of the Khmer Rouge led by the Communist Party of Cambodia. The tightly controlled Cambodian media left very few images between 1975 and 1979. This was a time when millions of people died unnecessarily and about 200,000 were people of Chinese descent. Guangli Liu’s film is a collective imagination of that lost history based on propaganda videos and the disaster videos which spread throughout the world after the fall of the Khmer Rouge. Narrated through the autobiographical voice, a tender, personal history unfurls as a virtual reality of an imagined recent past. Detailing the human condition and traumas of the dispossessed. The contrast between the archive footage and the 3D reconstruction shows the role of the experimental digital as it interweaves memory with history into the universal of being human.
- Year2020
- Runtime21 minutes
- LanguageChinese
- CountryFrance
- PremiereChicago Premiere
- ProducerGuylaine Huet
- FilmmakerGuangli Liu
- EditorIsmaël Joffroy Chandoutis, Léo Guillaume, Yuyan Wang
- Sound DesignMartin Delzescaux, Inoa Kan
- MusicYoann Helynck