Closed on MON - TUE

Casino Cambodia

 

Casino Cambodia

Thai, documentary, 1994

105 min

Ing K

English, Khmer, Thai & French

(Thai & English subs)

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A trip to post-war Cambodia as it turns itself into a business opportunity and playground raises the question of who gets to write history.
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This 1994 film documenting Cambodia’s tentative return to peace, from the POV of a former UN volunteer on the Thai-Cambodian border, has a bittersweet contemporary resonance that is both eerie and poignant, like Cambodia itself. The restoration wisely left the faded colours alone, intact with all its analogue grains, thereby deepening the sense of time travel. Down the rabbit hole we go, through mass graves and war-haunted ruins with backpackers and deminers, to “communist man-eating crocs” and a treacherous reunion of old refugee camp colleagues (including the film’s director): Dr Haing Ngor (Oscar-winner of ‘The Killing Fields’ fame) and Dr Daniel Susott (later the drag queen Guru Dan in ‘DogGod’). All leads straight to the roots of the ultimate question: Who writes our history? Who shapes our collective memory of the past, of how we got here and now.
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‘Casino Cambodia’ version 2026 has one addition of a brief clip from a UNHCR documentary from 1980, recently posted on YouTube, of the film’s director (then a recent art college drop-out and UN volunteer) teaching a classroom at Khao I Dang refugee camp. Ing K calls this her “first full-length and last conventional film” (right before ‘DogGod’ and decades before ‘Shakespeare Must Die’), made while she was still very much an investigative journalist; yet the experience is profoundly surreal.
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Those who think this is no time for a Thai film that shows Cambodians as sweet-natured humans should please remember that the people of Cambodia and Hun Sen are not one and the same, and try to understand why they have endured his rule for nearly half a century.
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Made before the director’s domestic national security banning and international blacklisting, ‘Casino Cambodia’ was screened in countless film festivals around the world, including Rotterdam and Busan. This is its first release in Thailand, with Thai subtitles.
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CASINO CAMBODIA Sample Reviews:

“This cool, clear documentary [presents] a different view on the Cambodian tragedy than we usually see in the West… The film tries to avoid simple ethical judgements and is considerably more alarming than what is shown about Cambodia on television.”

– Rotterdam International Film Festival programme

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“Even more outstanding is Casino Cambodia, directed by the local ‘barefoot’ filmmaker IngK… Thefilm highlights the tragicomic and borders on the absurd.”

– The Nation (Bangkok)

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“Casino Cambodia resists easy moral judgements and is certainly more troubling than anything you will see on the TV news. Perhaps the most startling encounter is with Dr Haing Ngor, actor-hero of The Killing Fields. Ing knew him years ago in the refugee camps. Now she finds him deforesting his homeland with alogging operation…”

– Chris Berry, Department of Cinema Studies,

LaTrobe University, Melbourne.

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“Surprisingly, recreation also has a role in ‘Casino Cambodia’, which casts an amused but sympathetic eye at the war-ravaged country’s efforts to build a tourist trade. It is narrator Ing K’s thesis that the news media have ‘sensationalized’ and ‘oversimplified’ Cambodia, and her ironic, impressionistic approach is suited to raising provocative questions rather than providing solid answers.”

– John Anderson, Newsday (New York)

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“Casino Cambodia reassesses conventional opinions about the recent return of relative peace there. The UN presence…and the wave of entrepreneurs that came with it, are shown to have resulted in an international playground (or casino) as much as an exercise in nation-building… Simplistic perspectives in the media are not so easily excused, and the film looks at how the complexity of the Khmer Rouge’s origin has largely been left out of recent coverage.”

– Manager Magazine (Bangkok)

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Trailer :

 

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Ticket 160 Baht / Seat
[Tickets Available in front of the cinema]
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