Davy Chou

In the days following October 7, Y., a jazz musician, and his wife Yasmin, a dancer, resolve to say yes to everything. Y. and Yasmin sell their bodies and souls to the highest bidder, surrendering themselves and their art to Israel’s social, political and military elite. Soon, Y. is entrusted with a mission of the utmost importance: to compose the music for a rousing, ruthless new national anthem.

Japan, 1944. Trained for intelligence work, Hiroo Onoda, 22 years old, discovers a philosophy contrary to the official line: no suicide; stay alive whatever happens; the mission is more important than anything else. Sent to Lubang, a small island in the Philippines where the Americans are about to land, this role will be to wage a guerrilla war until the return of the Japanese troops. The Empire will surrender soon after; Onoda, 10,000 days later.

After an impulsive travel decision to visit friends, Freddie, 25, returns to South Korea for the first time, where she was born before being adopted and raised in France. Freddie suddenly finds herself embarking on an unexpected journey in a country she knows so little about, taking her life in new and unexpected directions.

In 1982, Wim Wenders asked 16 of his fellow directors to speak on the future of cinema, resulting in the film Room 666. Now, 40 years later, in Cannes, director Lubna Playoust asks Wim Wenders himself and a new generation of filmmakers (James Gray, Rebecca Zlotowski, Claire Denis, Olivier Assayas, Nadav Lapid, Asghar Farhadi, Alice Rohrwacher and more) the same question: “is cinema a language about to get lost, an art about to die?”

Sorn, an ethnic Shan sex worker, tries to build a future in Chiang Mai, Thailand, as a refugee far from home, but he is drawn into a complex relationship with one client, an investigator probing a political activist.

This documentary reveals the tension and tragedy of the Cambodian-Thai border conflict through the stories of an ex-soldier and villagers on both sides.

On a lonely night, Tuk Tuk driver Nath meets a woman who reminds him of his past. Returning home, he confesses to his wife that he wants to move. This realization ultimately reveals the unspoken realities of their marriage dating from the Khmer Rouge period.

Bora, an 18-year-old, leaves his village to work on the construction sites of Diamond Island, a project for an ultra-modern paradise for the rich and a symbol of tomorrow’s Cambodia. He befriends his fellow workers and finds his elder brother, the charismatic Solei, who went missing five years earlier. Solei introduces him into an exciting world, that of an urban and wealthy youth, its girls, nights and illusions.

Over three million Cambodians died in the genocide between 1975 and 1979. The Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror also decimated a homegrown film industry that had flourished since 1960: movie theaters were bombed, film prints were destroyed and artists were executed. In Golden Slumbers, French-Cambodian filmmaker Davy Chou mourns this loss of lives and culture, but balances the somber material with a playfulness that honors the lush melodramas and mythic adventures of the glory years.

Samnang, 20, faces the demolition of his lifelong home in Phnom Penh and the pressures from family, friends, and neighbors which arise and intersect in this moment of sudden change.

Kanitha, a young, free-spirited Cambodian woman in her 20s, lives in modern-day Phnom Penh, working multiple jobs and choosing to live how she pleases. However, her daydreaming creates tension with her traditional mother, who wants a daughter that will settle down to get married, and Kanitha seems ambivalent to her father's deteriorating health. The family's struggle seems immutable, but Kanitha dreams an idea born from memories of her father. TURN LEFT TURN RIGHT is structured as an album, with tracks and sounds influencing the form. The film weaves Cambodian rock songs together with motifs of family, nature, and boundless imagination.

Kavich Neang documents the final days of the White Building in Phnom Penh, an architectural landmark he had lived in since birth.

Years ago, a helicopter crashed under mysterious circumstances high in the mountains. Climbing the slopes to investigate the accident, a journalist and a soldier encounter a shaman deep in the forest who tells them about ancient rain rituals.

A young woman working late at night at a beauty salon gives into her restrained interest in a young man who spends his evenings driving Phnom Penh's streets by motorbike as a delivery man.

A nurse helps Vicheka make sense of his dreams after he returns to a transformed Sihanoukville to memorialise his father in this restrained film about the human cost of Chinese investment in Cambodia.

Phnom Penh at night. Three young hip-hop dancers drive a single motorbike and stop on a muddy deserted road. Nick leaves the others to look for an iPhone he heard was lost in the area. Piseth and Thy discuss their hopes and doubts, and Piseth shows his best Michael Jackson moves. They meet Leakhena, a young female street vendor whose cart is full of colors.

On the Cambodian island of Koh Sdach, a local diver examines coral reefs and seahorse populations while exploring the environmental impacts of his village's commercial development and growing fishing industry.

Forty years after the fall of Phnom Penh, Cambodian artists inherit a pluralistic history whose groping threads they unravel. Sera Ing works on the sculpture which will become the first memorial of the genocide but the project encounters difficulties to exist. How do artists reappropriate history and culture from which they have been dispossessed?

Thida, the spirit guardian of an old cinema facing demolition, must confront her existence as a ghost and the choice of rebirth. When she meets Hai, a living human with whom she forms a deep bond, their connection forces her to face not only her spiritual destiny but also the realities of a country undergoing profound economic and social change.

Wandering in the streets of Sihanoukville, at night.