Remembrance Unspooled: Golden Slumbers

Many of the films at this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival evoked an almost tangible sense of the end of something, of an impending loss, much of which derived from a collective acknowledgement that we are now in the dying days of film as a physical medium. Davy Chou’s Golden Slumbers (2011) mines a similar set of emotions, but does so from the perspective of another celluloid disappearance, looking back over the history of the Cambodian national cinema, from its inauguration in the early 1960s to its obliteration by the Khmer Rouge in the mid 1970s. Over this period more than 400 films were produced in the country, almost all of which were destroyed when Pol Pot’s regime came to power and abolished the film industry, sending its practitioners to work camps and executions. This cinematic moment is now virtually unknown except among the Cambodian diaspora and those who lived through the Khmer Rouge years.