Shadow of Darkness: Sror Morl Anthakal(HKAFF 2019)

A pioneer in Cambodian cinema, Yvon Hem made home movies with a 16mm camera in his youth and worked on Marcel Camus's Cambodia-set Birds of Paradise in 1962 before delivering a dozen hit features. Then came the Khmer Rouge, and out went the "bourgeois" act of filmmaking: he returned to Phnom Penh in 1979, scavenged parts on the streets to construct a camera, and finally produced Shadow Of Darkness in 1987. A fictionalised account of the brutal oppression experienced by a family living in a labour camp headed by malicious cadres, the film was the first feature to be made in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia. Heavy on malevolent melodrama, the film heralds the style that would again become commonplace in mainstream Cambodian cinema in the years to come.