(California) Dreaming at the 2021 Cambodia Town Film Festival

“My friend once asked me if I wanted to smoke. I guess he thought it would help.” As some of the first words that pass between the two main and only characters of the 2019 short film California Dreaming, this line moves us toward writer and director Sreylin Meas’s caring and diaphanous storytelling. In the course of this passing confession to a stranger on a tree-shaded path, we are given the sketch of a dislocated relationship. For viewers, the desire to soothe a difficulty or harm that remains unnamed emerges. The specifics – who, why, help with what – are kept out of frame. Still, something important is offered. This Khmer-language short film from Phnom Penh-based Cambodian filmmaker Sreylin Meas was screened this past September at the 9th annual Cambodia Town Film Festival in Long Beach, California. California Dreaming gives a closely framed view of a chance meeting between Sarita (portrayed by Sarita Reth) and Sak (Monysak Sou) against the backdrop of the Cambodian oceanside. These two women with different implied histories spend an unplanned day together, sparsely discussing dreams and gendered demands on their relationships to time, money, space, and themselves. Much is gestural or held unsaid in the sixteen-minute film, offered in painterly shots of muted blue, grey, and green. Yet, its framing and production give gentle space to the romantic encounter–perhaps, love story–between these two women. Toward this coupling, the unsaid, the absent, the obscured are also measured lenses Meas uses to create a space of queer feminist possibility.

In our conversation a few weeks after the Long Beach screening, Meas suggests filmmaking is a conscious site of collective meaning making. “For me,” she holds, “the process of it is also answering your own question, and sometimes, you are not able to find your own answer, but you created the space.” Perhaps, she notes, “then the audience will be able to interact with you and sometimes may be able to have the answer or to help you digest your own piece.” Meas is a member of the Phnom Penh-based film collective Anti-Archive. She is one of three women filmmakers in Anti-Archive’s Echoes from Tomorrow project, a program crowdsourced to support her, Danech San, and Kanitha Tith in the production of each of their first short films. The second film in this project to emerge, California Dreaming, is the culmination of Meas’s ten years of working behind the scenes on others’ films. She learned technique and sensibility, careful modes of writing, directing, and photographic framing ‘on the job’ from fellow Anti-Archive filmmakers, including French Cambodian filmmaker Davy Chou (who produced this short film) and, most recently, Kavich Neang’s The White Building (ប៊ូឌីញ ស). In this way, Anti-Archive is also an informal film school, bringing together diasporic knowledge in both the stories they tell and the process of telling.

California Dreaming’s presence at the Cambodia Town Film Festival marks the multidirectional influence of diasporic communities and refugee transit. It appeared in the festival’s shorts program alongside other pieces coming out of Cambodia, the Khmer diaspora, and the Long Beach community. The festival takes place at the Art Theater Long Beach in Cambodia Town, the home of thousands of Cambodian refugees displaced by the Khmer Rouge Genocide and Cold War imperialism, and now the site of the largest Khmer community outside of Cambodia. The festival organizers, including founders Prach Ly and Caylee So, work to uplift global Khmer culture, highlighting “the diversity of the Cambodian experience through the art of filmmaking.” Diaspora is often understood to denote a one-way cultural flow–the lives and practices folks take with them when they leave their homes, often under conditions of war and violence, that allow them to seed and grow elsewhere. Yet, the film’s vision and screening together mark the storied weight of refugee migration, life making practices, and dreams likewise to homeland. That is, diaspora marks a (at least) two way impact and intimacy, as diasporic communities also shape the spaces they are said to come from (Macharia 2019). This convergence of the Festival’s work with Meas’s perhaps then marks what scholar (and the festival’s Grants and Communications Director) Cathy Schlund-Vials terms “a connective ‘yearning’ and diasporic (non)belonging that is foundational to a distinctly feminist transnational subjectivity” (2019, 107).    

Much aligned with the Cambodia Town Film Festival’s work and the community it convenes, Meas theorizes that a film can be a question you ask that you don’t necessarily know, or can as an individual know, the answer to. In this way, the film is a site of feminist worldmaking that maintains its open-endedness as a matter of political urgency and collective hope: two women from different, unknown backgrounds, fleeing unspecified city pressures and common gendered expectations of a good life, meet by chance on a beach and find refuge in each other. Sak and Sarita dream together, for a moment at least. In both our conversation and the film itself, Meas considers how to work through conditions of ineffable desire, what holding violence in the body over generations does to women, and the modalities of expression they can access. The film explores what should and should not be said, what action should and should not be taken, and negotiations between generations and with oneself. What is clearly crucial to Meas’s work is making space for the expression of such (as yet) unanswered questions in the collective and communicable work of filmmaking. What is important is “having your own ways and be able to share, be able to express, be able to discuss,” she holds. It’s “not even be able to win the conversation or win something, [but to] be able to explore.” In this personal film, Meas marks a dream whose fruition is uncertainly desired. Yet, it is this act, her expression, that seeks ground for others to do the same.

If you want to follow and support the Cambodia Town Film Festival’s work as they celebrate their upcoming 10th annual program, go to CambodiaTownFilmFestival.com. To see more of Sreylin Meas and Anti-Archive’s projects or to find upcoming screenings of their work, visit antiarchive.com.

About the author: Emily Mitamura is a poet and doctoral student in political theory at the University of Minnesota. Her work takes up the performative and narrative demands placed on those in the wake of mass violence, centering the Cambodian Genocide and its afterlives in film and filmmaking community. 

Works Cited: 

Schlund-Vials, Cathy J. “Diaspora Revisited: Toward a Transnational Feminist Critique.”  Women’s Studies Quarterly. 47(1): 99-109, 2019. 

Macharia, K’eguro. Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy Across the Black Diaspora. NYU Press, 2019.