The Bophana Center is an audiovisual center located in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The center is dedicated to restoring, [1] protecting and enhancing the Cambodian audiovisual heritage.
The Bophana Center was co-founded in late 2006 [2] by leu Pannakar and Cambodian-French filmmaker Rithy Panh. [3] [4] Rithy Panh has been critically acclaimed for his work. [5] [6] Most recently, he received the top prize of the "Un certain regard" competition at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival for his documentary The Missing Picture. [7] [8]
The Bophana Center is an official member of the International Federation of Television Archives (FIAT) and the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF). [9]
As a survivor of the Khmer Rouge genocide, Rithy Panh moved to France in 1980. After rejecting the memory of his early years in Cambodia and then in the refugee camps in Thailand, he abandoned his carpentry studies to devote himself to cinema. He graduated from IDHEC in 1988.
Between 1975 and 1979, the Khmer Rouge destroyed the major part of Cambodian cultural productions. During the 1990s, Rithy Panh and Pannakar Leu, former director of the Cambodian Centre cinema envisioned the creation of a center dedicated to the restoration of the Cambodian audiovisual heritage.
The Bophana Center took shape during the early 2000s with the support of the National Audiovisual Institute (INA). It was inaugurated in Phnom Penh on December 4, 2006.
Since its launch, the Bophana Center has been fulfilling three goals: archiving, creation and training. It aims to contribute to the duty of remembrance associated with the Khmer Rouge dictatorship by collecting archives (audiovisual and written), organizing cultural events (screenings, exhibitions and conferences) and training Cambodian young people in cinematography. [10]
"[The] role [of Bophana Center] is to give back remembrance to Cambodians. Forgetting is an affront to history and contributes to a deficit of democracy."
— Rithy Panh
The Bophana Center is named after a young Cambodian woman incarcerated in the S21 detention camp. During the dictatorship, Bophana would write secret love letters to her husband. That act of resistance resulted in her being tortured for several months. She was executed in 1977 when she was only 25. The movie Bophana: A Cambodian Tragedy , directed by Rithy Panh in 1996, tells her story.
The Bophana Center is located in the "White House", a building from the 1960s, whose style recalls Le Corbusier and Vann Mo-Lyvann. Surviving the Khmer regime and the successive phases of urbanization of the city, it was restored in 2006 to its original architecture with the help of Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts of Cambodia.
The Bophana Center collects all types of archives from recent works of Cambodian filmmakers, through early films by the Lumière Brothers, to King Norodom Sihanouk's movies. The archives come from Cambodia, France and the United States. Over 2,000 titles, 700 hours of video archives, 210 hours of audio records and 10,000 images are listed in Khmer, French and English and available to the public for free on the "Hanuman Database" digital platform. To date, more than 240,000 people have visited the archives of the Bophana Center.
Each week the Bophana Centre organizes free screenings of classic, Cambodian and foreign independent films. The Bophana Center has also set up a free Movie Club open to Cambodians and aimed at young audiences.
The Bophana Center regularly exhibits Cambodian and foreign artists whose work aims to represent the various facets of Cambodia.
The Bophana Centre organizes conferences about Cambodia's history, architecture and traditions.
The Bophana Center has a film production that trains young Cambodians. They are supervised by Rithy Panh as well as movie professionals.
The Bophana Center have a free library for all publish user but under the condition of the center.
Every Saturday, Bophana Center have free screening for all audiences entry.
Since 2008, the Bophana Centre organizes traveling projections in the Cambodian province. Over 23 000 people attended in 2013.
Since 2010, the Bophana Center and the Film Commission have been hosting the CIFF (Cambodia International Film Festival). The CIFF is free and funds films produced in Cambodia. [11]
Since 2014, One Dollar Project collects short films made by filmmakers from emerging countries in order to film the daily life of people living in poverty. [12]
The center has created three documentaries highlighting best practices in elephant conservation as well as other topics.
The Bophana Center also has:
Articles related to Cambodia and Cambodian culture include:
Rithy Panh is a Cambodian documentary film director and screenwriter.
Cinema in Cambodia began in the 1950s, and many films were being screened in theaters throughout the country by the 1960s, which are regarded as the "golden age". After a near-disappearance during the Khmer Rouge regime, competition from video and television has meant that the Cambodian film industry is a small one.
Vann Nath was a Cambodian painter, artist, writer, and human rights activist. He was the eighth Cambodian to win the Lillian Hellman/Hammett Award since 1995. He was one of only seven known adult survivors of S-21 camp, where 20,000 Cambodians were tortured and executed during the Khmer Rouge regime.
S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine is a 2003 documentary film directed by Rithy Panh. Rithy, himself a survivor of the Khmer Rouge, brought together two former prisoners of the regime with their former captors at Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, the former Security Prison 21 (S-21) under the Khmer Rouge.
Rice People is a 1994 Cambodian drama film directed and co-written by Rithy Panh. Adapted from the 1966 novel Ranjau Sepanjang Jalan, by Malaysian author Shahnon Ahmad, which is set in the Malaysian state of Kedah, Rice People is the story of a rural family in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia, struggling to bring in a single season's rice crop. It was filmed in the Cambodian village of Kamreang, in the Kien Svay and Boeung Thom areas of Kandal Province near Phnom Penh, on the banks of the Mekong River. The cast features both professional and non-professional actors.
Dy Saveth is a Cambodian actress and first Miss Cambodia (1959) often referred to as the "actress of tears". She is "one of the most beloved actresses from the 1960s era of Cambodian film".
Bophana: A Cambodian Tragedy, or Bophana, une tragédie cambodgienne, is a 1996 French-Cambodian made-for-television docudrama directed by Rithy Panh.
The Burnt Theatre, or Les Artistes du Théâtre Brûlé, is a 2005 French-Cambodian docudrama directed and co-written by Rithy Panh. A blend of fact and fiction, based on the actual lives of the actors, the film depicts a troupe of actors and dancers struggling to practise their art in the burned-out shell of Cambodia's former national theatre, the Preah Suramarit National Theatre in Phnom Penh.
Am Rong was a Cambodian soldier and filmmaker, who acted as a spokesman on military matters for the Khmer Republic during the Cambodian Civil War. Western journalists commented on the irony of his name as he gave briefings which "painted a rosy picture of the increasingly desperate situation on the ground" during the war.
The Missing Picture is a 2013 Cambodian-French documentary film directed by Rithy Panh about the Khmer Rouge.
Davy Chou is a Cambodian-French filmmaker. He has written, directed and produced several films. Chou made his feature length debut with Diamond Island (2016) and made his follow-up with the film Return to Seoul (2022).
Red Wedding is a 2012 documentary film co-directed by Lida Chan and Guillaume Suon, which portrays a victim of forced marriage under the Khmer Rouge regime.
Guillaume Suon is a French-Cambodian filmmaker.
Lida Chan is a Cambodian filmmaker.
Anvaya is a Khmer association established in 2010 with a self-described mission to "bring together and support the returning movement of scattered Cambodians from overseas". Anaya is an independent, non-political, non-profit organization. It is an active organization within Cambodia and in countries with a Cambodian population that has been scattered.
Exile is a 2016 Cambodian-French documentary film edited, written, and directed by Rithy Panh which explores the effects of forced displacement. It was selected to screen in the Special Screenings section of the 2016 Cannes Film Festival.
The Elimination is an autobiographical account of Rithy Panh's survival during the Pol Pot regime. It was co-written with novelist Christophe Bataille and published in 2011 by Grasset Publishing. This book is also an essay and report that documents the one-on-one conversations between Rithy Panh and Duch, a former Khmer Rouge officer. To better represent the Khmer Rouge regime and to further influence the reader's mind, Rithy Pan juxtaposed his own personal story with the interviews with Duch
Shadow of Darkness is a 1989 Cambodian historical drama film written and directed by Yvon Hem. It is the first Cambodian film to be set during the Democratic Kampuchea era, as previous films about the period such as The Killing Fields and Nine Circles of Hell were from foreign countries. The film tells the fictional story of Visal, who survived the tragic execution of his family by the Khmer Rouge and escapes toward Vietnam.
Mao Ayuth was a Cambodian filmmaker and politician. One of the few filmmakers to survive the Khmer Rouge regime, he was noted, alongside Dy Saveth, Yvon Hem, and Bun Yim, as connecting contemporary Cambodian cinema with its golden age of the 1960s and 1970s. He died during the COVID-19 pandemic.