The film industry in Cambodia was given a new lease of life in 2000 with the release of Pos Keng Kong (The Giant Snake). A remake of a 1950s Cambodian classic, it tells the story of a powerful young girl born from a rural relationship between a woman and a snake king. It is an interest­ing love story, albeit with dodgy special effects, and achieved massive box-office success around the region. Sadly, its success also points to the downfall of the Cambodian industry, as bootleg versions soon appeared all over Asia.

  The success of Pos Keng Kong has heralded a revival in the Cambodian film industry and local directors are now turning out up to a dozen films a year. However, most of these new films are vampire or ghost films and of dubious artistic value.

  At least one overseas Cambodian director has had success in fairly recent years: Rithy Panh's People of the Rice Fields was nominated for the' Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1995. The film touches only fleetingly on the Khmer Rouge, depicting the lives of a family eking out an arduous existence in the rice-fields. His other films include One Night After the War (1997), the story of a young Khmer kick-boxer falling for a bar girl in Phnom Penh, and The Land of Wandering Souls (1999), which tells the story of rural migrant workers employed to lay a fiber-optic cable to connect Phnom Penh and Bangkok.

  The definitive film about Cambodia is The Killing Fields (1985), which tells the story of American journalist Sydney Schanberg and his Cam­bodian assistant Dith Pran. Most of the footage was actually shot in Thailand: it was filmed in 1984 when Cambodia was effectively closed to the West, particularly to filmmakers.