The Bophana Audiovisual Resource Center opened its doors in Phnom Penh in December 2006, with the aim of collecting and making widely accessible the country’s audiovisual heritage. Since then, it has provided practical training and professional support to hundreds of aspiring archivists, filmmakers and audiovisual technicians. At the same time, it has become a hub for discussion and artistic creation centred on the history, memory and future of Cambodia.
This chapter is a part of a hybrid and dialogic history of the Bophana Center. As a process of co-creation, the telling of this history crosses geographic, temporal, professional and genre boundaries, bringing artists, technicians, academics and audiences together to share their knowledge and lived experience of Cambodia and cinema. This material is thus the product of an unscripted conversation that was recorded, transcribed and rendered in textual form. In it, we explore the intersections of documentary filmmaking, wildlife exploitation, historical trauma and indigenous knowledge, with particular focus on an elephant conservation project managed by the Bophana Center in 2020. Three overarching questions anchor the discussion: Why cinema? What harm? What repair?
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Asie du Sud Est Research Network 