Day One
Our plan was to run the Boomtown Babylon pilot in the lakeside slum of Boeung Kake, in the North of Phnom Penh. But someone set fire to it last week and the authorities were like “nu-uh” and retracted the permissions they had granted us. So Day One was all about Plan B.
Guided by super-duper on-site collaborator, our beloved soon-to-be superstar director Koam Chanrasmey, Day One took us from the embers of Boeung Kak to the crumbling chaos of human existence known as the White Building (by Niemeyer-Courboisier architectural lovechild Vann Molyvann) in the steaming centre of Phnom Penh.
The slum community which flanks the Boeung Kak lake has been living under threat of forced and abrupt eviction for years - and last week a fire blazed through a large portion of the settlement, destroying 160 family homes. We explored the neighbourhood and spent some time in the home of a widowed community elder-lady called Sophat. With Smey as our interpreter, we talked at length about the issues afflicting the community (powerlessness, exclusion, intractable poverty). We left feeling inspired her enthusiasm for the ways in which our little grass-roots documentary project might help communicate stories from within the community to the eyes of the political elite - as well as an international audience of web users when we put the film online.
The White Building is visually spell-binding - a dilapidated relic of Vann Molyvann’s pioneering social housing project from the 1960s, now home to thousands of artists, musicians, everyday families, sex workers and drugs addicts. An intensely dynamic hub of humanity where we will certainly do something during our time here, watch this space station…
Tonight we’ll check the first stuff we shot on our little Kodak Zi6’s and plan our next move. Overall sensation: bedazzingly hot, dynamic and bubbling with a warm and wilfull people working hard to regain the soul and beauty that was devastated over 30 years ago by that perverted Pol Pot ideology - only three years long and still recovering.
