Original Title
ជាតិក្រោយ (Chiet Krawy)
Genre
Sci-fi, Mystery, Drama
Production Year
2021
Country of Origin
Cambodia, USA
Language Spoken
Khmer, English
Length
102 mins
World Premiere
Venice Critics’ Week (opening film)
Director
Jake Wachtel
Scriptwriter
Jake Wachtel, Christopher Seán Larsen
Cast
Srey Leak Chitth, Leng Heng Prak, Sahajak Boonthanakit, Cindy Sirinya Bishop
Production Company
Valerie Steinberg Productions
Producer
Valerie Steinberg
NOD
September 2021
In near-future Phnom Penh, a teenage boy teams up with a street-smart girl from his neighborhood to untangle the mystery of his past-life dreams. What begins as a hunt for a Buddhist treasure soon leads to greater discoveries that will either end in digital enlightenment or a total loss of identity.
director
Jake Wachtel grew up in Palo Alto, California but now considers himself a dedicated peripatetic, having spent much of the past decade wandering the globe. After graduating from Stanford University with degrees in Psychology and Film Studies, he began a career making short documentaries for nonprofits and social impact ventures working in the global south—his work has been featured on NYTimes.com, Wired, NPR, and MSNBC. In 2015, hungering to get to know a single community more in-depth, he moved to Cambodia to teach a year-long class in filmmaking to children living in disadvantaged neighborhoods. His Phnom Penh-set short film The Foreigner Here premiered at the Cambodian International Film Festival alongside the works of a new wave of young Cambodian directors. Phnom Penh became his home base for several years as he developed Karmalink—Cambodia’s first sci-fi movie—set in the community where he taught and starring his former students.
producer
Valerie Steinberg is a producer based in Los Angeles, and working globally. She has taken part in the Rotterdam Lab, Berlinale Talents, Sundance Institute x WIF Financing Intensive, Venice Biennale College Cinema, Film Independent Producing Lab, and Tribeca Film Institute Network. Her award-winning short film credits include Coffee Shop Names (dir. Deepak Sethi, Tribeca 2021, HBO), Blocks (dir. Bridget Moloney, Sundance 2020), Hair Wolf (dir. Mariama Diallo; 2018 Sundance award winner; Criterion Channel), Fry Day (dir. Laura Moss; SXSW; Tribeca award winner; Criterion Channel), and Everybody Dies! (dir. Nuotama Bodomo; SXSW; HBO’s Random Acts of Flyness; Criterion Channel). She is also an Executive Producer of the upcoming narrative feature Beast, directed by Riley Keough and Gina Gammell, and Consulting Producer of Ash Mayfair’s Vietnamese period drama feature film The Third Wife (TIFF award winner; three-time 2020 Independent Spirit Award nominee). Valerie earned her BA in Philosophy and Chinese at Yale University.
Cambodia is speeding headlong into the future. It often seems like things are changing here much faster than in Silicon Valley, where I come from. Fertile, yet perennially overlooked, ground for a sci-fi story.
How is this rapid development affecting the individual, culture, values? For example, how did family structure change when kids began signing up for Facebook, creating personal profiles? The very design of Facebook has a profoundly different effect in a community-oriented place like Cambodia, than it does in the individualist West, where the technology was developed.
I found myself reflecting on these questions continually during my year teaching filmmaking to kids living in Tralop Bek, a neighborhood built around the railroad tracks that bisect Phnom Penh. Tralop Bek is a special place, in this chaotic and teeming metropolis—it really has a small community, traditional feel. But Tralop Bek is under threat from displacement from all sides—the physical kind (see: the 4,000 families “relocated” from nearby Boueng Kak Lake, which was filled in with sand to make space for luxury developments), but also more much more subtle forms.
I rather hate the word “slum” because it carries in the imagination a litany of heinous sufferings. For all intents and purposes, Tralop Bek is a “slum”—most people there don’t make much money, even by Cambodian standards—but the typical stories about “slums” are woefully unrepresentative of this place. You know these stories, full of the tropes of “poverty porn”, encouraging us to root for the protagonist to escape their plight (and by extension, their community)—the ultimate individualist, capitalist fantasy. I hope Karmalink, as a celebration of Tralop Bek and its inhabitants, can be an antidote to that narrative, while questioning the trade-offs being made as we hurtle ever faster into a more homogenized, consumerist, and connected future.
Finally, as an avid meditator who studied neuroscience, I’m perpetually fascinated by the strange machinations of well-meaning but myopic techno-utopists, so those elements figure into the story as well.
THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
American expat director Jake Wachtel was teaching a film course in Cambodia when inspiration struck for his futuristic reincarnation mystery Karmalink. He then enlisted his two favorite students to star in the film and even help write the script.
It was on day four of a 10-day silent meditation retreat in Cambodia that Jake Wachtel began arranging ideas about reincarnation and implanted memories that had been fermenting in his mind for several months into what he calls a “fully-fledged movie.” That film would eventually become his feature debut Karmalink, a gripping and uniquely spun Khmer-language sci-fi mystery set in a near-future Phnom Penh that is now opening Venice’s Critics’ Week sidebar.
“I came out of that meditation retreat feeling like, whoa, I really like this idea now and want to put everything into it,” he says.
Read the full interview.
Leng Heng
Leng Heng Prak grew up in the neighborhood where Karmalink was shot, the Tralop Bek neighborhood of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. He took part in Jake Wachtel’s filmmaking class from 2014 till 2015 where he learned about the different aspects of making films. In this class he wrote a short story which inspired Wachtel to write the screenplay for Karmalink.
Srey Leak
Srey Leak Chhith grew up in the Tralop Bek neighborhood of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where Karmalink takes place. They got their first taste of acting (and directing, writing, gaffing, animating, etc.) as a student in Jake Wachtel’s filmmaking class in 2014-2015. This was her first time acting outside of student projects.
Vattanak
Sahajak Boonthanakit was born in Bangkok, and grew up between Nairobi and New York. His acting career began with roles in The Beach with Leonardo DiCaprio, followed by Brokedown Palace with Claire Danes. He has since acted in over 80 productions, including Only God Forgives with Ryan Gosling, The Lady with Michelle Yeoh and David Thewlis, and No Escape with Pierce Brosnan and Owen Wilson.
Sophia
Cindy Sirinya Bishop is a supermodel, actress, and TV presenter based in Bangkok, Thailand. Cindy has starred in numerous Thai drama series over the last 25 years, and served as the host of Asia’s Next Top Model for 3 seasons. She currently hosts the present season of Supermodel Me. Her recent international roles include Sophia in Karmalink and the role of Mother in the upcoming Netflix feature film, Kate.
