Double booked

Original movie poster for Nine Circles of Hell

Why can't I be in two places at one time? Answers on a postcard. This coming Saturday afternoon is one of those occasions. The quarter-finals of the Hun Sen Cup will be in full swing at Olympic Stadium, it's football so I'm drawn to it like a moth to a lightbulb, whilst at 4pm that same afternoon, a film will be shown at Bophana that I've wanted to see for a long time. Nine Circles of Hell, a love story set during the Khmer Rouge regime, was filmed in Cambodia in 1987, as I explained in an earlier blog posting here and featured a Czech-Cambodian collaboration. Though I won't be there, you can see it at Bophana Center on St 200 at 4pm this Saturday (20th Feb). It'll be the Khmer version, rather than the Czech version! On the subject of filming, various locations around Phnom Penh have been used in the past week for filming of National Geographic tv's Banged Up Abroad, a series of programmes showing Westerners who end up in foreign prisons. This particular programme is not about Cambodia but is being used as a 'stand-in' location for Thailand.

A Russian movie poster for Nine Circles of Hell

Nine Circles of Hell

Nine Circles of Hell

In searching for films and documentaries to show at Meta House that haven't been seen, or very rarely, in Cambodia, I've heard about a film that was shot in Cambodia in 1987 and released a couple of years later. 130 minutes in length, it was made by Czech filmmaker Milan Muchna with the aid of the Cambodian Culture Ministry and called Nine Circles of Hell (Devet Kruhu Pekla). Set amidst the Khmer Rouge takeover, it tells the poignant story of a Czech doctor who falls in love with a Cambodian actress played by Oum Savanny and they have a child. Forced to leave the country, the doctor, played by Milan Knazko, returns after the KR regime is ousted to search for his child. As film making was still very much in its infancy in the 1980s, it may've been the only co-production movie set and filmed solely in Cambodia during that era, unless you know different.