Cambodian Sci-Fi Film ‘Karmalink’ Spotlights Displaced Communities And Country’s Tech Developments

In 2014, Jake Wachtel moved to Cambodia to teach a year-long class in filmmaking to children as part of the ‘Filmmakers Without Borders’ initiative. After collaborating with several young Cambodian filmmakers on short films, Wachtel wrote and directed the first Cambodian science-fiction film, Karmalink. Karmalink was selected as the opening film for Venice Critics’ Week and has screened at the Austin Film Festival and Glasgow Film Festival.

Wachtel cited Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro as an inspiration for Karmalink, particularly the novel’s use of the science fiction genre to interrogate issues involving society’s marginalized communities. He thought about the possibilities of Karmalink’s story taking place in a Cambodian neighborhood instead of a British boarding school.

“Sci-fi is a genre that has this amazing potential for us to imagine futures and talk about social justice issues, socio-political issues. Yet you find that there’s not a lot of sci-fi movies coming out of a place like Cambodia or Southeast Asia,” Wachtel says. “There’s something sort of elitist in how the genre plays out, that sci-fi only belongs in a place like Silicon Valley or something like this.”

Karmalink is set in the near future, where the rich and privileged in Phnom Penh are augmented with nanotech. New skyscrapers tower over the city and nearby, a community is threatened with forced eviction. A teenage boy has dreams of his past lives, which lead him on a treasure hunt.

Two of Wachtel’s students, Leng Heng Prak and Srey Leak Chhit, were the inspiration for the story’s lead characters and they both scored their acting debuts in Karmalink. The film received a theatrical run in Los Angeles, Seattle, Berkeley and Sebastopol and released on July 15 on Apple TV, iTunes, AmazonAMZN
, Google Play, among others.

On how Wachtel developed the look for the film, he said that it was the product of a deep collaboration with director of photography Robert Leitzell and production designer Olga Miasnikova. However, Wachtel insists that Cambodia’s landscapes and environment take center stage. “[For] the aesthetic, we took our cue from what it feels like to be in Cambodia right now. In the present, sometimes it feels like a sci-fi novel. That’s something a lot of people don’t think about when they think of Cambodia,” Wachtel shares. “People think about the past. They think about history like Angkor Wat or the Khmer Rouge, but to be there right now is incredibly exciting. The society is speeding headlong into the future. There are a lot of changes.”

“One of the things that I really love about Cambodia and that we drew on is this feeling of the old and the new co-existing side by side,” Wachtel adds. “There are a lot of recycled materials and technologies from different eras. You get this kind of overlapping or intermingling of the past, present and the future when you stand on a street corner in Phnom Penh and look around.”

One change that Wachtel observed while in Cambodia was the displacement of nearly 4,000 families when they were evicted from Boeung Kak lake in the center of Phnom Penh. A part of the lake had been filled with sand to make way for development projects. This observation informs some parts of Karmalink’s narrative, especially the film’s setting in a community that is also experiencing eviction. “The movie really came from this place of observation of talking to a lot of Cambodians, how they’re feeling about this process of development and how the culture is changing,” Wachtel says.

At the same time, Wachtel is aware of his own position as an American making films in Cambodia and reflected on the implications of this. “Going to Cambodia to teach filmmaking, I feel this tension that I’m an avatar of certain Western values just by showing up,” Wachtel says. “Having worked for many years in the field of development and storytelling as a freelance filmmaker for nonprofits and NGOs, [it] gave me a lot of time to think about who gets to tell whose stories and how those stories are told. What is the value of having diversity of stories? What are the values behind those stories?”

Wachtel shared that he is heartened by the “renaissance” of filmmaking happening in Cambodia. While he presented Karmalink at the Venice Critics’ Week, Cambodian filmmaker Kavich Neang screened his first fiction feacture film, White Building, in the Venice Film Festival’s Orizzonti section. White Building later won the Best Actor award. “It feels like there’s a sort of renaissance or blossoming happening in Cambodian cinema after so many decades,” Wachtel says. “The film industry was really decimated when the Khmer Rouge came to power.”

Wachtel added that one of his proudest moments as a filmmaker was co-organizing a showcase festival of his students’ films with the Bophana Center, which was founded by critically-acclaimed Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh. The Bophana Center is dedicated to restoring and promoting Cambodian audiovisual heritage. Seeing his students’ films on the big screen, Wachtel felt grateful that their work was celebrated by the wider community and became hopeful for the new wave of Cambodian filmmakers in the years to come.