• 
• 
• 

• 
• 
• 

Introduction

Cambodia, France / 2019 / 77 min
Director：NEANG Kavich

The "White Building" is a Phnom Penh housing complex known for its distinctive architectural style that was built in 1963. Also recognized as a historic building which survived the Khmer Rouge years, the apartments have continued to deteriorate. In 2017 the building was set to be demolished after being acquired by a Japanese company. Director NEANG Kavich, who was born and raised in the White Building, took a camera into the building before its demolishment and captured the last days of the various people living there for this documentary.
The film is a portrait of the community at the housing complex.There are people still going about their day normally, but many who have resided there for a long time have already begun preparing to move out. NEANG's documentary gives audiences the valuable experience of witnessing the process of a building in which people have resided for over 50 years gradually becoming abandoned. "Diamond Island" (2016) director Davy CHOU serves as producer. Winner of the NETPAC Award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

Director's Statement

Sometimes I don't know whether I live in my dreams or in reality. I have a recurring dream about the White Building, the place where I grew up. But my documentary film is not bound to the separation between my dreams and the hardness of reality. With my film, I am able to return to the past, to the cherished details of my childhood home, before moving back again into the reality of a present where the White Building no longer exists.
The White Building was one of Phnom Penh's last remaining structures of modernist architecture from before the Khmer Rouge era. I see parallels between the evacuation that took place on 17 April 1975, when the Khmer Rouge sent the city dwellers out into rural cooperatives to work for the nearly four years of the regime, and the displacement by means of development that has been taking place in the city for the past ten or fifteen years. Years of conflict and dilapidation left the White Building to squatters and crime, but the building also housed one of the city's most vibrant communities of local artists, including my father. Just like the historic features of its architecture and crumbling façade, its village-like community was rare in contemporary Phnom Penh's center.
or me, the White Building had its own spirit. It almost breathed as one, with the shared walls of apartments or the constant buzz of activity in the long, single corridor always forcing neighbors into each other's lives.
Reality is too complex so we invent stories; fiction helps untangle the mess. I was in the midst of writing a fictional feature trying to make sense of my life at the White Building when the news came: the White Building was going to be emptied and demolished after residents, including my family, finally accepted the offer of a new luxury condo developer. The same reality that pushed out 6,000 residents was the same force that would not allow me to film my narrative there. Reality wouldn't allow me to finish my fantasy so instead of writing my own fiction, I followed the residents with my camera and helped them write their own.

note