Kep, Cambodia — For the first Kep International Art Week, the Cambodia International Film Festival (CIFF) unveils the first titles of its curated programme of films about the arts, screened in the open air by the sea, in the presence of members of their cast and crew.
The Art Week brings performances, exhibitions and film screenings to Cambodia’s coastal town. CIFF’s selection answers it with films in which art is a way of living with a place: dance on land and in water, painting born from melting glaciers, the towers of a changing city, and the songs that carried a nation’s memory across the world.
Kep has no cinema, so the festival brings cinema to the town. Each screening takes place outdoors, facing the Gulf of Thailand, among the jungle, the sea and the modernist villas that are themselves part of Cambodia’s artistic heritage.
Directors, performers and members of the crews will introduce their films and meet the audience after the screenings. These conversations give residents, students, artists and visitors a rare chance to hear from the people who made the films, about how they were made and the art they portray.
The programme travels from Cambodia’s fishing villages to Iceland’s glaciers, and from the unfinished towers of a Cambodian city to the Cambodian diaspora. This first selection features a Cambodian premiere and the work of Cambodian, Canadian, European and American filmmakers. More titles will be announced in the coming weeks.
The films
Floating Between
A spirit takes shape between jungle and sea, floating, walking and dancing on land and in water, until it reaches Avlatan, a fishing village on stilts near the Thai border. This city-dweller discovers the ocean, the mountains, the rivers and the waterfalls, a benevolent ghost in a world he stumbled into by chance.
Along plank paths and wooden bridges, he moves from family to family and into the intimacy of their homes. He sees hard and sometimes sad daily lives, but also the joy, the repeated simple gestures and the mischievous children of a community that has long lived with nature and depends on the ocean.
Between contemplative trance and empathy, Vannak Khun’s film is a choreography of encounter. For an Art Week held on Cambodia’s coast, it is a mirror held up to the fishing communities whose lives depend on the sea that Kep’s artists and conservationists are working to protect.
A Cambodian artist, a Cambodian coastline and a body that listens to nature. Shot in the land and seascapes of Cambodia’s southwest, Floating Between turns dance into a way of paying attention to the sea, the forest and the people who depend on them. Screened a few steps from the Gulf of Thailand, it brings the film’s world almost within reach of the audience.
Trillionth i: Transmission
Conceived and produced during the COVID-19 pandemic to celebrate universal human connection, this Cambodian-Canadian dance film was shot across five countries: Cambodia, Canada, Mexico, Italy and Indonesia.
Its 15-member international ensemble brings together contemporary, classical and traditional artists. The Cambodian dancers include Chy Ratana, Chanborey Soy, a leading Lakhaon Khaol masked dancer and contemporary performer, Ros Sokunthea, Rasy Hul, Mouern Chanthy and Chea Ratanakitya. They dance alongside Canadian artists Jennifer Dahl, Bonnie Kim, Andrea Nann, Carlos Rivera, Heidi Strauss and Peter Chin himself, and Mexico’s Marina Acevedo.
With such a strong Cambodian presence, Peter Chin built a distinctive matrix of Cambodian dance and music into the heart of the film. Live instruments and voices by Katherine Duncanson, Jennifer Moore and Andrew Timar carry the dancers from one continent to the next.
Lakhaon Khaol, the Cambodian masked dance-drama listed by UNESCO as heritage in need of urgent safeguarding, meets contemporary dance from around the world. The film shows Cambodian performers not as guardians of a frozen tradition but as partners in a living, global art form. At a time when the world was forced apart, it proves that a gesture made in Cambodia can answer one made in Canada, Mexico, Italy or Indonesia.
On Melting Snow
Every landscape holds a memory of our planet, memories cruelly divided by time and by the borders that people draw. For 33 years, artist Sophie Cauvin has travelled to meet these transformed landscapes, collecting and reuniting their fragmented memories and immortalising them in astonishing works of art.
Mojtaba Bahadori follows her journey, in which art becomes a way of recording a planet in transformation. In Kep, where the S.E.A. Ocean Gallery will turn sculpture into living reef, the film speaks directly to the Art Week’s link between creation and the protection of nature.
The glaciers of the North may seem far from Cambodia’s tropical coast, but they are part of the same story. As ice melts, sea levels rise, and coastal towns like Kep are among the places that will feel it first. On Melting Snow shows an artist answering that change with patience and beauty, and invites Kep’s audiences to see their own shoreline, mangroves and reefs as memories worth keeping.
Promised Spaces Cambodian premiere
Sleepless from the heat, Sokun leaves his crowded construction workers’ dormitory and joins a community of fellow workers living in one of the city’s many unfinished high-rises. Another tower offers a long-awaited luxury home to its first tenant, Seda, who soon feels trapped in the vast gated complex.
Between those who build the towers and those who live in them, Promised Spaces looks at what Cambodia’s new architecture promises and to whom. Shown for the first time in Cambodia, the film opens a timely conversation in a town whose 1960s villas once embodied a different promise of modern living.
A Cambodian co-production that looks at the country’s construction boom from the inside, through the bodies and sleepless nights of those who build it. Its unfinished towers and gated complexes stand in striking contrast with Kep’s New Khmer modernist villas, designed in the 1960s for the climate, the light and the landscape. The film invites a simple question that architects, artists and residents can share after the screening: what kind of spaces does Cambodia want to promise its people?
Elvis of Cambodia
Sinn Sisamouth, Cambodia’s most famous singer, died during the Khmer Rouge regime, yet his voice lives on through Cambodian refugees around the globe. Chris G. Parkhurst’s film recalls the outstanding musical achievements of his life.
It also shows how his songs have shaped the spiritual, intellectual and cultural growth of Cambodians worldwide, and helped them heal. Under the night sky of Kep, a town that lived Cambodia’s golden age of the 1960s, the film is an invitation to remember together, and to sing along.
Sinn Sisamouth was the voice of Cambodia’s golden age, the same years when Kep became the country’s seaside jewel. His songs survived the regime that tried to erase artists, and they became a thread that tied refugee families to home. Bringing his story back to a Cambodian town, under an open sky, is a celebration of the power of art to outlive violence and keep a culture alive.
Practical information
- Dates
- December 2026, during the Kep International Art Week
- Venue
- open-air screenings in Kep, Cambodia — exact locations to be announced
- Languages
- films screened in original version with Khmer and English subtitles
- Guests
- directors, performers and crew members present at the screenings
- Organised by
- the Cambodia International Film Festival (CIFF), within the Kep International Art Week