Playing Cambodia

Cambodia, November 2000: after about a thirty year civil war and more than three million victims, peace seems back again, but the name of Pol Pot, two years after his death, resounds in all speeches and individual stories. And yet in this land still plagued by so many horrors, people play, at any time, at each corner, in the country as well as in town, often for money. Under Pol Pot's heel, death had wiped everything away, not just the playing games, but also schools, medicines, religion. Today the farmers, after a hard working season, can bet even all their harvest in a cockfight, while boys play bowling without thinking that those grey and hollow balls were used to blast people out. In this journey we are driven by five characters. Their voices and smiling faces show the complexity of reality to the foreigner, while the games are the reading clue, the fil rouge unwinding along the places, along the memories, narrating a desperate and wild world.