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Camerado is a commercial film, video and multimedia production group [1] that produces independent, multicultural-themed films, videos, and media events with a prosocial agenda.
Camerado has been operating in Southeast Asia since 2005, and is one of the first few motion picture production companies to be functioning in Cambodia since the departure of the Khmer Rouge regime.
Camerado, which is named for poem Song of the Open Road in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, was originally established in New York City in 2000 to support the production and launch of the award winning social issue documentary, Bookwars. [2] BookWars premiered at the 2000 New York Underground Film Festival 2000 New York Underground Film Festival, where it won the Best Documentary Award.
Camerado subsequently relocated to New Mexico in 2003 to commence production of the multicultural feature drama, Lost in New Mexico: the strange tale of Susan Hero (2008). [3] [4] The ultra-low budget effort was financed primarily with a World Trade Center disaster grant, following the loss of the original Camerado offices in New York to toxic dust and debris. [5]
The film featured Native American actors and non-actors, and addressed a wide variety of social issue themes, including illegal immigration and human cloning. Lost in New Mexico premiered at the Riverside International Film Festival, and went on to screen at the Route 66 Film Festival, [6] the International Panorama of Independent Film, [7] the Santa Fe Film Festival, [8] and other venues and festivals. The movie is currently represented by Goliath Arts for TV sales in North America and Europe.
In 2004, on the eve of the second US incursion into Iraq, Camerado suspended operations in the United States and relocated to Southeast Asia to undertake prosocial media efforts there.
In 2005, Camerado was commissioned by the NGO Forum on Cambodia to produce an investigative documentary, Crisis (2005), [9] about landgrabbing in indigenous areas of the Cambodian province of Ratanakiri. The film features Khmer, Jarai, and Tampuen indigenous languages, with a Cambodian voiceover.
Camerado later produced the commissioned documentary, Have Forest, Have Life, (2006) [10] a joint effort of the conservation groups Wildaid, Conservation International, and Fauna and Flora International. Have Forest, Have Life was intended to raise awareness about biodiversity issues in the remote Cardamom forest region of Cambodia. Production of the documentary was unorthodox for a donor-financed documentary, as it utilized fictionalized characters, re-enactments, and dramatic-style narration to engage rural audiences as effectively as possible.
In 2008, Camerado produced Cambodia’s first rockumentary, Vuth Learns to Rock the story of a young Cambodian who hears Western rock music for the first time and learns about the Doors, the Ramones, the Kinks, and other rock luminaries. Produced by Vuth Tep, a Cambodian motorcycle taxi driver who learned to shoot and produce video with Camerado, Vuth Learns to Rock premiered at the 2009 Florida Film Festival [11] and continues to screen at venues around the world.
Unlike the traditionally hierarchical structure of many studios and production groups, Camerado is decentralized and "wiki-like", with talent being incorporated into projects in a participatory basis. With Camerado’s Cambodia-based efforts, local Khmer staff were trained from scratch, due to the generation of skilled media practitioners who were mostly killed off during the Khmer Rouge regime.
Camerado is the founder and producer of Cambodia's only international, independent film festival, CamboFest , [12] which was established in 2007 in part to help revive the flagging Cambodian film industry after its destruction during the Khmer Rouge regime. Screenings to date have taken place in Phnom Penh, Siem Reap (home of Angkor Wat), and in rural areas and provincial towns in Cambodia. CamboFest is recognized by the Asia Pacific Screen Awards [13] and others as the sole film submitting organization representing Cambodia for their pan-Asian event.
Camerado founded Cambodia’s first online video sharing portal, CamboTube , as a grass-roots effort in 2007 in order to provide a liberalized media outlet for a new generation of Cambodian Internet users, while contributing to Internet and media literacy. The portal was hailed by the Cambodia Daily as “an important tool for democracy”, though it was greeted with wariness by the Cambodian government - who nonetheless did not interfere with its operations.
CamboTube was eventually hampered by digital divide issues which still faces the bulk of the Cambodian population, and is currently being folded into a broader, regional, online channel.
Meetings between Camerado principal Jason Rosette and relevant Cambodian Ministry officials in 2008 led to the production of a copyright guide for usage of pre-Khmer Rouge music, film, and other content, as the intervening Khmer Rouge regime had abolished all ownership and thereby "orphaned" many affected works. [14]
The Camerado-produced Bangkok IndieFest, [15] is an independent film festival in Bangkok, Thailand, which features the world’s first dedicated Edutainment movie competition, alongside purely entertaining films and videos. The festival was conceived to showcase Thai and International independent films and edutainment media in a single, multicultural environment.
The Khmer Rouge is the name that was popularly given to members of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) and by extension to the regime through which the CPK ruled Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. The name was coined in the 1960s by then Chief of State Norodom Sihanouk to describe his country's heterogeneous, communist-led dissidents, with whom he allied after his 1970 overthrow.
Ratanakiri is a province of northeast Cambodia. It borders the provinces of Mondulkiri to the south and Stung Treng to the west and the countries of Laos (Attapeu) and Vietnam to the north and east, respectively. The province extends from the mountains of the Annamite Range in the north, across a hilly plateau between the Tonlé San and Tonlé Srepok rivers, to tropical deciduous forests in the south. In recent years, logging and mining have scarred Ratanakiri's environment, long known for its beauty.
Jarai people or Jarais are an Austronesian indigenous people and ethnic group native to Vietnam's Central Highlands, as well as in the Cambodian northeast Province of Ratanakiri. During the Vietnam War, many Jarai persons, as well as members of other Montagnard groups, collaborated with US Special Forces, and many were resettled with their families in the United States, particularly in North Carolina, after the war.
Dengue Fever is an American band from Los Angeles who combine Cambodian rock and pop music of the 1960s and 70s with psychedelic rock and other world music styles. Their most recent album, Ting Mong, was released in September 2023.
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.
Media in Cambodia is largely unregulated and includes radio, television and print media outlets. Private sector companies have moved into the media sector, which represents a change from years of state-run broadcasting and publishing.
Banlung is the capital of Ratanakiri Province in northeastern Cambodia, and is 636 kilometres from the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh. Ratanakiri Province borders Vietnam and Laos. Banlung had been previously known as Banlung district before it officially gained town status. The town has a population of around 17,000 and the surrounding district has a population of 23,888.
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.
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.
The Red Sense is a 2006 Khmer-Australian supernatural thriller film. It was director Tim Pek's debut film and was produced by Transparent Pictures. The success of The Red Sense led Transparent Pictures to produce films such as Bokator and Annoyed. The Red Sense was first released in Australia in August 2008, and though banned for general release there, screened in Cambodia in December that year. It is rated M by the Office of Film and Literature Classification of Australia.
The Khmer Loeu is the collective name given to the various indigenous ethnic groups residing in the highlands of Cambodia. The Khmer Loeu are found mainly in the northeastern provinces of Ratanakiri, Stung Treng, and Mondulkiri. Most of the highland groups are Mon-Khmer peoples and are distantly related, to one degree or another, to the Khmer. Two of the Khmer Loeu groups are Chamic peoples, a branch of the Austronesian peoples, and have a very different linguistic and cultural background. The Mon–Khmer-speaking tribes are the aboriginal inhabitants of mainland Southeast Asia, their ancestors having trickled into the area from the northwest during the prehistoric metal ages. The Austronesian-speaking groups, Rade and Jarai, are descendants of the Malayo-Polynesian peoples who came to what is now coastal Vietnam; they established the Champa kingdoms, and after their decline migrated west over the Annamite Range, dispersing between the Mon–Khmer groups.
Enemies of the People is a 2009 British-Cambodian documentary film written and directed by Rob Lemkin and Thet Sambath. The film depicts the 10-year quest of co-director Sambath to find truth and closure in the Killing Fields of Cambodia. The film features interviews of former Khmer Rouge officials from the most senior surviving leader to the men and women who slit throats during the regime of Democratic Kampuchea between 1975 and 1979.
CamboFest is an international film festival in Cambodia started in 2007 by Camerado. It is Cambodia's first internationally recognized film festival, and one of the first regular international movie events in Cambodia since the Khmer Rouge era.
The Missing Picture is a 2013 Cambodian-French documentary film directed by Rithy Panh about the Khmer Rouge.
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.
Kalyanee Mam is a filmmaker whose film, A River Changes Course, which she directed and produced, has won several awards, including the Grand Jury Award for World Cinema Documentary at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and the Golden Gate Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 2013 San Francisco International Film Festival.
Guillaume Suon is a French-Cambodian filmmaker.
Lida Chan is a Cambodian filmmaker.
The Bophana Center is an audiovisual center located in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The center is dedicated to restoring, protecting and enhancing the Cambodian audiovisual heritage.
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