And yet you see it happen in Egypt, and in Brazil, and all around the world.
It happens in London, it happens in the UK, and in Ireland. The councils in London sell off these blocks of flats to developers for no money at all and the developer kicks everybody out and builds a new block of flats, but the compensation that the inhabitants get isn't enough to buy a new flat in the new development. So they get moved away. They get moved out of the neighbourhood. They get offered a house 200 miles up the country in another city. Tearing families apart as if they are just boxes of furniture or something. When the film played at the Toronto Hot Docs festival and we won the special jury prize, the film that won the Canadian prize Unarmed Verses was about gentrification in Toronto and about how black neighbours are being pushed out. In Cambodia, and this is true of the people in my film and in a lot of places, people aren't against development and people aren't against the idea of progress but it has to be inclusive and it has to be done in a way where they are included in the development process. For example, if you are going to be kicked out of your home because a property developer wants to turn it into luxury apartments then you should be compensated enough to be able to buy an equivalent piece of land somewhere else in the city and still have access to schools and health care and work and these kinds of opportunities that you have got and you have had. Especially if you have legal ownership of the land then there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to expect that kind of thing and that's the same anywhere. But it just doesn't happen because people are driven by profits and greed.
You filmed for 6 years and it's been three years since you put down the camera. How much footage did you have and how long did it take to edit it down?
The timeline is basically I started researching when I got back to Ireland in 2007, then got a crew together, a producer, an executive producer, and started to get funding. I was going to pitching markets and things like that, pitching the idea and going to producer workshops about 2008. Got the funding, it takes a while obviously for that to happen, and then got the equipment and flew out in June 2009. Started filming in July 2009 and filmed until October 2015. The very last shot in the film is the last thing that I filmed. So when Srey Pov turns her head away from the camera I kind of knew and I put the camera down. That's it, the story is done now, I've shot everything that I need. That to me felt like a very natural scene to end the film. I had edited some scenes together and we worked with a really brilliant editor in the UK called John Mister. He does future films and documentaries, and he had worked on the Monty Python films back in the 70's. We started in 2015 editing and we did an assembly and then I think we spent over a year in the edit room. The amount of footage that we had wasn't as much as you would have thought. I could have had a lot more but i was an editor before so I knew how to shoot for an edit. Although the editor probably wouldn't say that I knew how to shoot for an edit! The filming process was quite difficult because I was often just there alone with a camera and trying to figure out what was going on and obviously not understanding anything. There was a tendency with Cambodian people for them to phone me and say "yesterday we got evicted" and I would try to explain that actually I wanted to be there when that happened to film it and document it as it happens, rather than have them tell me afterwards in an interview that it happened. I had translators who were basically calling up the people that I was filming with 3 times a week to find out if anything was happening, keeping very close contact with the subjects in the film the whole time that we were there. I can't remember how many hours there were, but it was less than 280 hours for the 6 years. There were certain period where there was a lot of activity and a lot of filming and sometimes we were filming for days and days and days in a row because stuff was happening. And then because the two locations are 300km apart you'd often be filming in Phnom Peng and then you'd be told that tomorrow the farmers are going back to their land and there may be a confrontation with the authorities. So then I'd have to get on a bus that night at 7 o'clock, the overnight bus to Siem Reap but it was so busy that there was no seats and we'd have to sit on the floor.
CinÉireann / May 2018 31