Best Cambodian documentary movies

Rithy Panh uses clay figures, archival footage, and his narration to recreate the atrocities Cambodia's Khmer Rouge committed between 1975 and 1979.

The Khmer Rouge slaughtered nearly two million people in the late 1970s. Yet the Killing Fields of Cambodia remain unexplained. Until now. Enter Thet Sambath, an unassuming, yet cunning, investigative journalist who spends a decade of his life gaining the trust of the men and women who perpetrated the massacres. From the foot soldiers who slit throats to Pol Pot's right-hand man, the notorious Brother Number Two, Sambath records shocking testimony never before seen or heard. Having neglected his own family for years, Sambath's work comes at a price. But his is a personal mission. He lost his parents and his siblings in the Killing Fields. Amidst his journey to discover why his family died, we come to understand for the first time the real story of Cambodia's tragedy.

Bngvel is the real-life story of Phally, a Cambodian man struggling against the odds to be a good husband and father. Never being able to provide enough for his card-playing wife, he heads to the big city in search of better employment opportunities, only to find the more he earns, the more he spends. Numbing out with beer and girls, he comes to a point of crisis that shakes him up, and he becomes determined to make amends.

Under the Khmer Rouge regime, Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch, directed the M13 prison for four years, before becoming the head of S21, the terrifying death machine that eliminated Khmer Rouge opponents. Some 12,280 Cambodians met their deaths here. In July 2010, Duch was the first Khmer leader to appear before an international court, which sentenced him to 35 years in prison. He appealed the sentence. While Duch waited for his new trial, Rithy Panh questioned him in depth.

The refugee camp Khao-I-Dang on the border of Cambodia and Thailand was known as the “hill of death.” Hundreds of thousands of people fleeing famine or certain death under the Khmer Rouge arrived there exhausted. Among them were a mother and her baby daughter, who later found a home in France. Fourty years later, the daughter—filmmaker Neary Adeline Hay—follows the trail back in a highly personal, elegantly filmed journey through their past.

Joker, Kookie and Djumbo are “Khmericans”: Cambodian refugees who grew up in the United States and were deported back to Cambodia after serving a prison sentence.

In her feature directorial debut, Kalyanee Mam, the cinematographer for the Academy Award–winning documentary Inside Job, explores the damage rapid development has wrought in her native Cambodia on both a human and environmental level.

The film traces modern-day slavery in Cambodia by disclosing the fate of this young woman and following, in parallel, the daily lives of two human traffickers, a local recruiter and the head of an agency. Cambodian people call these traffickers Mey Kechol: The Storm Makers.

A feature-length, environmental thriller that follows investigative journalist, Matt Blomberg, and ocean activist, Paul Ferber, in their dangerous efforts to create a marine conservation area and combat the relentless tide of illegal fishing. Along the way a new generation of Cambodian environmentalists are inspired to create a better life for their people.

During the last half-century, Cambodia has witnessed genocide, decades of war and the collapse of social order. Now, documentary filmmaker Rithy Panh looks at an irreparable tragedy that is less visible, yet no less pervasive: the spiritual death that results when young women are forced into prostitution. Angry and impassioned, PAPER CANNOT WRAP UP EMBERS presents the searing stories of poor Asian women whose lives were violated and their destinies destroyed when their bodies were turned into items of sexual commerce.

In 1999 a fibre-glas wire was installed from Thailand to Vietnam straight trough Cambodia. Rithy Panh shows us the work done in Cambodia to connect Khmer-society to "modern world". Farmers, soldiers and children work for a living there and unearthen skulls and bones -their remains from PolPot-regime you can see. The fear in their mind is portrayed by Rithy Panh in this documentary. As the other work done by Rithy Panh this deals with his people. I like it very much! The movie was awarded 1999 at "Visions du Réel" in Nyon (Switzerland) and at "Cinéma du Réel" in Paris.

My mother always refused to speak about her childhood during the Cambodian genocide. Upset by her silence, my brother and I decide to follow Antoine, a grandson of Armenian genocide survivors, photographing the ghosts of his ancestors in the Middle East.

The incredible true story of two women who fell in love, survived the Khmer Rouge, became a family, and transformed a community. A heartbreaking and uplifting look at the power of the human spirit and the will to survive.

After a century of genocidal ideologies and destructive speciesism, animals have enslaved humans and taken over the world. In a wave of hope, the statues of the past have been removed but new ones are being erected to suppress the will of the people. This is now a planet of apes, boars and lions, and a zoological revolution is reversing and recreating the atrocities of the 20th century.

Based upon documentation of forced confessions made during the Khmer Rouge era in Cambodia, this film reconstructs the relationship of a young woman, Hout Bophana, and Ly Sitha before they were tortured in executed in 1977.

A former-soldier from the Cambodian army deserted in 1991. He lives with his wife and children in a village near Phnom Penh. He explains: “For us it’s simple: the sons of the poor go off to war, the sons of the wealthy go to town to become policemen, the sons of Party members go abroad to study.”

A woman who has returned from a refugee camp in Thailand lives with her four children under a tree in the middle of Phnom Penh: a tender portrait and violent denunciation of the conditions often reserved by the country for many of its returning refugees.

This film indicates some situations at Calmette Hospital. One patient described the difficulty of earning money to pay for medical treatment.

Ary used to live in the countryside. Forced by her mother to marry a man she doesn`t love, she runs away to Phnom Penh a few days before the wedding. But once there, she quickly finds herself trapped: sold off several times over, she is forced to dance in bars or is beaten. She becomes an escort girl and earns a good living going out with foreigners.

Because of the war, a woman's husband died, leaving behind three children. Sovanna is worried about losing her mother. She wants to go back and need her father, who died in the war, back.

A documentary showcasing the nation of Cambodia.