Top 20 Greatest Cambodia Movies of All Time. You should check out these Cambodia Movies. These Cambodia Movies will give you a lot of fun and practice.
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Cambodia Movies
1. First They Killed My Father (2017)
Director: Angelina Jolie
In the 1975 Khmer Republic, Loung Ung was an officer in the Khmer National Armed Forces also known as “Pa” to his seven children. During the Vietnam War, when US forces begin bombing North Vietnamese forces seeking to flee to the neutral zone, the conflict spreads to nearby Cambodia, starting the Cambodian Civil War.
The US then withdraws and closes its embassy in Cambodia. After the Khmer Rouge eventually gain control of Phnom Penh, they issue an order for all families to leave the city as refugees because they believe Americans will destroy it.
The family is located by Pa’s brother-in-law, and Loung’s family visits his uncle’s family. However, Aunt has insisted that Loung’s family leave because she is afraid of what will happen if Pa’s name is made public.
2. Jailbreak (2017)
Director: Jimmy Henderson
The police in Cambodia detain the gangster Playboy because they think he is the Butterfly gang’s boss. However, Playboy only bears responsibility for money laundering and other offenses, and he agrees to a plea deal in exchange for disclosing the identity of the real kingpin.
Playboy is to be escorted to the maximum security prison by the local police officers Dara, Tharoth, and Sucheat and the visiting French officer Jean-Paul. The true boss of the gang, Madame Butterfly, sets a bounty on Playboy in the interim. When the officers are about to leave the prison after delivering the Playboy, there is a disturbance, and the prisoners break out of their cells. Now that a security guard is leading them, the officers must struggle to stay alive.
3. Everything Will Be OK (2022)
Director: Rithy Panh
A scale model of a sandy desert with a megalith rising from it is visible. A young female voice declares while sinister string music ties listeners to their chairs. This introduction sets the stage for Rithy Panh’s dense mnemonic essay, which combines gorgeous dioramas to convey dystopian fiction for the twenty-first century.
After a century of destructive speciesism and genocide-inspiring beliefs, animals have subjugated people and taken over the planet. The statues of the past were taken down amid a wave of optimism, but new ones are being built to stifle the populace’s will. Now that lions, boars, and apes rule the earth, a zoological revolution is undoing and reenacting the horrors of the 20th century.
4. Mind Cage (2016)
Director: Amit Dubey
The plot centers on Jake Doyle and Mary Kelly, two detectives who are investigating a string of copycat murders. The murderer is imitating The Artist, a serial killer who used to display his victims aesthetically and is currently facing execution.
Detective Kelly visits The Artist to speak with him to gain insight into who might be responsible for the murders, in true quiet of the lamb fashion. The killer currently inside apparently knows too much about the investigation and the officers involved.
If his demands are met, he will divulge information piece by piece. It just so happens that the copycat abducts a prominent person, and a bargain is made with the artist to save her. It is revealed that Detective Doyle was being controlled by The Artist and was responsible for the kidnapping all along when the detectives locate the missing woman.
Kind of like in Denzel Washington’s film Fallen. Doyle is held accountable for the copycat crimes, and Detective Kelly is forced to shoot him. The Artist, who has the power to possess anyone he has created a sketch or drawing of, planned everything to have his sentence altered. This begs the question of why, if he was supernaturally powerful, he allowed himself to get entangled in the first place.
5. Diamond Island (2016)
Director: Davy Chou
Diamond Island, a vast, ultra-modern haven for the affluent on the river in Phnom Penh, is a symbol of Cambodia’s future. Bora, 18, is enticed from his village to work on the construction of this real estate developer’s dream, like many other rural guys before him. The Adolescent joins his missing older brother after moving from rural Cambodia to work in construction.
6. White Building (2021)
Director: Neang Kavich
The White Building, a residence in the Cambodian city of Phnom Penh that was eventually demolished in 2018 to make way for a casino, serves as the setting for this semi-autobiographical movie. Even though it initially appears abandoned to the outside observer, the opening sequence, a bird’s-eye tracking shot revealing the sheer scale of the block, is most effective in conveying the sense of loss felt by those who lived there.
This wasn’t just a crumbling building, but a sprawling urban complex home to approximately 493 families in its final weeks standing. The sense of security it gave before being taken away is strongly felt as we meet the community still residing there, even if those who lived there may have still been trying to make ends meet in a city that is becoming more and more globalized.
7. The Clock: Spirits Awakening (2019)
Director: Leak Lyda
Gloomy Sunday was dubbed the suicide song in 1940 due to the high number of suicides that year that were documented. After the passing of her boyfriend, a clock engineer at the time, listening to this song also caused a French woman to kill herself. Because her soul was not at peace, it came back to accomplish the wishes of other depressed people.
After Chanda, the girl’s biological mother left the family, Cheata moved home with her father and stepmother. She is depressed. She experiences verbal and physical abuse from her stepmother every day. This caused Cheata to descend into a deeper and deeper state of sadness along with her yearning for her real mother.
She struggles with despair and heartache, and holding onto her mother’s portrait and listening to her lullaby every night doesn’t help much. Cheata gave in to this temptation and was subsequently possessed by the French Lady’s ghost who had the Clock.
Chanda agrees to enter the domain of the Clock in the hopes of rescuing and bringing her daughter back after learning of the things that had transpired to her believer daughter. But in this world, the ghost of the French woman eventually reveals to Chanda what caused Cheata’s sadness and all the terrible things that had happened to her after she stopped having contact with her mother.
8. Karmalink (2021)
Director: Jake Wachtel
A young Cambodian detective unravels a connection between a neuroscientist’s desire to achieve digital nirvana and her friend’s past-life dreams of a missing gold artifact in this Buddhist science fiction mystery set in a near-future Phnom Penh.
A village in Phnom Penh is in fear of eviction in the not-too-distant future to make room for a bullet train service to China. Wealthy people “augment” their experiences with nanotechnology. Leng Heng has dreams at night about his past lives and a solid gold Buddha, which he believes will help keep his family from being kicked out. He starts looking for the Buddha with street orphan Srey Leak in the hopes that it will guard their village.
9. Coalesce (2020)
Director: Jessé Miceli
Three young males live in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. Songsa arrived in Phnom Penh to aid in clothing sales. Whoever enters a place of entertainment does so because they want a motorbike but lack the necessary funds.
Phearum operates a cab service, but he has no other way to cover his loan. What fate awaits those who must follow their finances and goals in a challenging world? The three people’s stories in the movie intertwine in a culture that is fast changing in Cambodia. Jesse Miceli, a fresh French director who was accepted to the ACID of the Cannes Film Festival this year, has directed his first movie. The movie presents a genuine picture of young people in modern Cambodia.
10. The Prey (2018)
Director: Jimmy Henderson
After spending years hunting down foreign criminals, Chinese police officer Xin is forced to turn into a prey animal after visiting a prison in a remote jungle area. He must struggle for his release and survive.
Xin is an undercover Interpol agent who appears to be located in Phnom Penh and is looking into a phone scam that is going around China. Xin must cooperate with the arrests when Cambodian police storm the operation’s headquarters and take everyone into custody to maintain his cover.
The group of detained criminals is transported to an abandoned prison near the border, where the warden is brutal and cruel. Just before being branded a troublemaker and dispatched with a group of other unfortunate fellow inmates on a strange mission in the forest, Xin manages to transmit a message to his employer in Beijing.
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11. The Spell (2019)
Director: Amit Dubey
In their new home, an evil spirit exacts revenge, shattering a couple’s existence. The two must now decide whether to go or stay and maybe perish. After running out of medication, an American illustrator who lost his fiancée explores the isolated countryside of Iceland. He is confused as to whether his compulsions are brought on by his illness or whether he is being pressured to share secret information.
12. The Rice People (1994)
Director: Rithy Panh
The film depicts the way of life of youngsters living in a refugee camp to highlight the tenuous balance it rests on and the freedom it stands for. When youngsters are asked where rice comes from the refugee camps in Cambodia, they reply, “From UN lorries.” A rice field has never been seen by them. These kids will eventually need to learn how to live in Cambodia, including how to cultivate, plow, and work the land. Rice people make an effort to spread this way of life, to show the precarious balance it rests on and the freedom it stands for.
13. Young Love (2019)
Director: Lomorpich Rithy
A teenage girl in a contemporary high school in Cambodia is trying to find her first kiss when an unexpected crush enters the picture and threatens to ruin her friendship with her childhood buddy. Tensions reveal worrisome secrets that will upset her equilibrium between love, friendship, and family amid undeveloped first-love feelings.
A 15-year-old girl named Kesor attends the prestigious school Western International while growing up in Phnom Penh with her grandmother and serving as the movie’s narrator. Rith, the wealthy and reserved guy who lives next door, and Kesor have a pretty tight connection that always appears to veer towards romance, especially as the novel progresses and discussions about first kisses grow more common. But eventually, on a trip to the countryside, Kesor runs with the handsome older student Veha, whose father has just crushed his ambitions to become a successful musician.
14. Fathers (2020)
Director: Huy Yaleng
FATHERS is a drama movie from Cambodia. It was chosen as Cambodia’s submission for the 93rd Academy Awards’ Best International Feature Film category, however, it did not receive a nomination. Based on a true event, Losing One Leg tells the tale of a guy who relies on his cyclo-tricycle to support his two children when his wife leaves them at the corner of a pagoda.
15. The Scarecrow (2023)
Director: Kou Darachan
Mantra, Soma, and their traveling companions entered a remote village where the residents had a firm conviction in the Ting Mong and Ta Mong rites. The group immediately started the investigation since they were interested in learning more about these practices.
They started to despise these beliefs, seeing them as nothing more than silly rituals as they continued to study and engage with the people. Soon after, the haunting and pursuing spirits in these places started to persistently haunt and follow the group, driving them to desperately try to find a way out to survive.
Their interest and ignorance of and disrespect for the locals’ beliefs led to a disastrous turn of events. A joyful adventure ends tragically due to curiosity. Villagers follow the Ting Mong and Ta Mong rites, according to their beliefs.
To find out more about this religion, Mantra, and Soma travel to a small village with their pals. They ultimately betrayed those convictions and now consider them to be silly rituals. Later, the ghosts in those locations try to haunt and pursue them nonstop until they are forced to flee for their life.
16. The Last Reel (2014)
Director: Kulikar Sotho
Sophoun, the disobedient child of a rigid army colonel, lives in the here and now by hanging around with a neighborhood gang. Sophoun escapes her crumbling home and seeks sanctuary in a shuttered movie theatre when her father comes home bearing yet another marriage proposal.
There, she is horrified to see an unfinished 1970s melodrama from days before the Khmer Rouge, in which her mother, who is now gravely ill, was cast as a beautiful young woman. a tale from an alternate reality and era. Sophoun recreates the film’s missing final reel with the assistance of the cinema’s old projectionist, playing her mother’s part once more.
She thinks that by screening the finished movie forty years later, her mother will be reminded of the life she once led and the psychological scars that still plague her will be healed. But the ancient movie raises more questions than it answers.
The cruel Khmer Rouge regime, which targeted actors and filmmakers in particular as enemies of the people, ended the promise of the Cambodian film industry and its newest star in 1975. Sophoun has the chance to control her fate by changing the final reel, but doing so comes at the expense of learning some difficult realities about her family’s history.
17. Before the Fall (2015)
Director: Ian White
A beautiful nightclub singer fights two lovers in a game of wits and trickery to escape a city that is under attack and is crumbling quickly. This complex, noir thriller is propelled by super stylish style and razor-sharp action. Cambodia 1975: Phnom Penh, the nation’s capital, is a city under siege.
The only thing preventing the Khmer Rouge guerilla forces from breaching the town’s frail defenses is the presence of the final US troops. A stunning nightclub singer fights two lovers in a game of wits and trickery inside this ominous, dystopian setting to escape the doomed city.
The acts of these three people, set to a chaotic rock and roll soundtrack, reflect the craziness and intensity of the events taking place around them.
18. Irradiés (2020)
Director: Rithy Panh
A movie about persons who have endured the radiation of war is advised to others who think they are immune to it. An intense, essential movie that strikes the heart and eye with unrelenting power. The title of the movie, “Radiation,” references not only the atomic bomb but also the Nazi death camps, the crimes committed in Vietnam and Cambodia, the use of poison gas in World War I trenches, and the taint that resides in everyone: the need to forget and the drive to destroy.
19. Last Night I Saw You Smiling (2019)
Director: Neang Kavich
A landmark building in Phnom Penh, which houses 493 people, is slated for removal. Kavich Neang follows three families, including his own, as they pack up their belongings, share memories and concerns, and eventually leave the building before it is destroyed in the final days of the structure.
20. Further and Further Away (2022)
Director: Polen Ly
Two siblings must say goodbye to the location they called home first, each in their manner, before they are about to embark on the capital city. Before leaving for the capital city in search of a better life, a young indigenous Bunong woman and her older brother spend one final day in their remote hamlet in northeastern Cambodia. She notices a latent wish to go back to their long-gone village that was lost to the construction of a neighboring hydroelectric dam a few years ago, even if her brother is enthusiastic about the move.
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