Allison Chhorn
Directing
Biography
Allison Chhorn is a Cambodian-Australian filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist living on Kaurna Land (South Australia). Her work explores the effects of migrant displacement and post-memory through impressionistic forms, often with other family members as subjects. Since graduating with Honours in painting at UniSA in 2014, she has made numerous films including ‘Blind Body’, ‘Missing’ and ‘The Plastic House’. The latter was filmed on her family’s farm and has screened at MIFF, New York Film Festival and the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art. Her films were also screened as part of a retrospective at the 11th Cambodian International Film Festival. Crossing into the gallery, she received the 2022 Porter St Commission from ACE Gallery to make her first solo exhibition and multi-channel installation ‘Skin Shade Night Day’ which was exhibited as part of The National: Australian Art Now at MCA in 2023.
Known For
A teenage boy stoner lives with his single mother.
Youth on the March
Skin Shade Night Day explores the daily routine and rituals practised by the artist’s Cambodian-Australian family, which are reperformed and documented through a process of embodied empathy. Acts of service, such as gardening and cooking, play out as echoes from the past across a sound and image installation displayed in a shadehouse. Spectres, shadows and aural textures conjure up impressions of a place that remembers how its inhabitants once lived.
Skin Shade Night Day
A Porsche driver is stranded in a small country town when his car breaks down. Unable to leave, he finds himself at the whim of the local colours. A conspiracy is brewing.
Mystic Park
"As abstract shapes come into focus, dim memories surface. With Blind Body, Allison Chhorn offers an impressionistic portrait of her grandmother Kim Nay, a survivor of the Khmer Rouge. Partially blind, Kim spends her days in a mostly sonic and textural world, in which the sound of rain, the voices of Khmer radio, and distant birdsong summon the sensations of a lost homeland." - New York Film Festival / Film at Lincoln Center
Blind Body
Constructing a solitary reality by imagining what life would be like after the passing of her parents, director Allison Chhorn's intricate docu-fiction chronicles her own process carrying on work in the family's titular 'plastic house'.
The Plastic House
Single-channel video, 4-channel audio.
Dissolve the Walls
A love story between mother and son through time, autism, and the screen. Since Clovis lost speech at the age of two, Nathalie has tried to find reciprocity with his more-than-verbal means of expression. Combining 30 years of recordings, past and present, "Looking" is an ode to their labors of care.
Looking at You Looking at Me
Adelaide filmmaker Allison Chhorn (NYFF 2020) visualises Cambodian-American poet Monica Sok’s poem Letter to the Moon Regarding False Intimacy with an intimate fictional drama of a mother and daughter separated by geography. Shot across Australia, the USA and Canada, Missing springs from research into the Facebook group “Missing People from the Khmer Rouge,” where diaspora members still search for Cambodian family members missing since the genocide.
Missing
A fifteen minute black-and-white film.
Unslept
Classic coming of age and iconic bird leaving the nest comingle and mix in this film as Christian boy Stanley discovers new experiences after entering the gay scene.
Stanley's Mouth
A dress. A couple. He holds on to the past but does she see a future? Or will this be the last time?