When Cambodia recently staged a national film festival, serious drama was in gruesomely short supply: almost half the entries were low-budget horror flicks.
It wasn't always thus.
In the 1960s, now-retired King Norodom Sihanouk was not only the patron of a Cambodian film industry, he was one of its most active practitioners. He wrote, directed and even acted in his own high-minded if formulaic romances and tragedies.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF FOX MOVIES
More than 300 Cambodian films were made during that vibrant era, some well-received in other Asian countries.
But when the communist, puritanical Khmer Rouge regime came to power in the mid-1970s it banned all kinds of entertainment and smashed cameras and film-making equipment.
As the country's spirit began to recover from the Khmer Rouge era, and economic revival took hold in the early 1990s, the industry began to rebound. More than 100 production houses sprang up, mostly using video equipment to churn out movies on a shoestring.
But most of them collapsed because of their amateurism, and the industry is still struggling to recover its former glory.
These days, about five movie making companies have the expertise and strong finances to succeed, said Chheng Sovanna, head of the Culture Ministry's movie production office.
``Most of them are accidental producers, who just spent US$3,000 on a camera, bought some tapes, turned on the light and started shooting,'' said Chheng Sovanna, himself a director who graduated from Russia's State Institute of Cinematography. ``We don't understand the way they make movies.''
And the filmmakers lean more toward anarchy than artistry on screen.
At the recent festival, a typical movie featured a female vampire baring her canine teeth in a grin as she looked for prey. In Nieng Arp, or Lady Vampire, a flying female head with internal organs dangling beneath it chased a terrified couple in the dark.
Nine of the festival's 22 entries were in a similar vein.
``We make movies to suit the domestic market and the demand of our youths,'' said Korm Chanthy, the manager of FCI Productions, which made Nieng Arp.
``They like to watch horror movies because they make them feel excited, thrilled and terrified,'' he said.
The government wasn't impressed. The filmmakers ``injected too much hallucination and superstition'' into their work, complained Culture Minister Prince Sisowath Panara Sirivuth.
``Their understanding of moviemaking is that it's just business,'' he said. ``And they have this misperception that, without training, they can still make movies.''
The government has touted the idea of establishing a film school, but in a country so poor and reliant on foreign aid as Cambodia the idea is unlikely to get off the ground anytime soon.
Producer, 29-year-old Heng Tola, was looking to diversify his computer business when he founded Campro three years ago with several friends.
Making a movie takes Campro about three months and costs an average of US$30,000, including about US$1,000 for the lead actor, he said.
Despite the current taste for horror movies, Heng Tola believes a more serious trend is emerging, prompted in part by the resentment many Cambodians feel about its colonial past and toward domineering neighbors such as Thailand and Vietnam.
One of the festival entries was a nationalistic epic about a peasant protest against high tax imposed by Cambodia's colonial rulers, the French.
``The Cambodian movie is being reborn after a long absence. Its existence has been up and down, and the question now is how we can make it really stand,'' Heng Tola said.
July 1 to July 7 Huang Ching-an (黃慶安) couldn’t help but notice Imelita Masongsong during a company party in the Philippines. With paler skin and more East Asian features, she did not look like the other locals. On top of his job duties, Huang had another mission in the country, given by his mother: to track down his cousin, who was deployed to the Philippines by the Japanese during World War II and never returned. Although it had been more than three decades, the family was still hoping to find him. Perhaps Imelita could provide some clues. Huang never found the cousin;
On Friday last week, China’s state-run Xinhua news agency very excitedly proclaimed “a set of judicial guidelines targeting die-hard ‘Taiwan independence’ separatists” had been issued “as a refinement and supplement to the country’s ‘Anti-Secession’ law” from 2005, with sentencing guidelines that included the death penalty as an option. At the same time, 77 People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) aircraft were flown into Taiwan’s air defense identification zones (ADIZ) in just 48 hours, a high enough number to indicate the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was peeved about something and wanted it known. What was puzzling is that the CCP always
Once again, we are listening to the government talk about bringing in foreign workers to help local manufacturing. Speaking at an investment summit in Washington DC, the Minister of Economic Affairs, J.W. Kuo (郭智輝), said that the nation must attract about 400,000 to 500,000 skilled foreign workers for high end manufacturing by 2040 to offset the falling population. That’s roughly 15 years from now. Using the lower number, Taiwan would have to import over 25,000 foreigners a year for these positions to reach that goal. The government has no idea what this sounds like to outsiders and to foreigners already living here.
David is a psychologist and has been taking part in drug-fueled gay orgies for the past 15 years. “The sex is crazy — utterly unbridled — which of course is partly down to the drugs but also because you can act out all your fantasies,” said the 54-year-old, who has been in a relationship for two years. Chemsex — taking drugs to enhance sexual pleasure and performance — “has opened a whole world of possibilities to me,” David added. “Sex doesn’t have to be limited to two people... There is a whole fantasy and transgressive side to it that turns me on. It