Praise for Cambodia: Lord Mukpo's Dream Time

The constant noise in this city, including whatever music may be blaring out, generally just pisses me off. However, the traditional music on your picture had me in tears. Sublime. This is an emotionally charged country, no doubt about it. And you have reinforced why I am here... I'd like my father to see the video. He will relate to it (the usual protective shutters will prove useless). - Tony Maich, Phnom Penh, Cambodia

I wanted to tell you how LUMINOUS, STILL,VIVID and AMAZING your film was. Amazing in that I kept asking: were the colors really like that in Cambodia? Have I forgotten? HIS dream, yes. - Bayard Cobb, Boulder, USA.

I received your DVD yesterday and watched it as soon as I got home. I tell you, it is a real "Bill's style of film" - very plain, non-trying and beautifully told. It reminded me one of A. Einstein's quote: "Make everything as simple as possible, but not a bit simpler". You knew that borderline. - Erkan Aktas, Istanbul, Turkey

As I watched the images of Cambodia they mingled with memories of Ecuador and I felt like I was there behind the camera, seeing with your eyes. It's a beautiful, arresting film. The people were so genuine, so unaffected by the presence of the camera. And the water buffalo made my spine tingle. A film made by Life itself. - Lisa Thompson, Washington D.C., USA

Western

Mountain

Cinema

The making of Cambodia: Lord Mukpo's Dream Time.

This is my first film, a thirty-minute documentary based on footage I took in Cambodia between February and June, 2007. On my daily, late afternoon walks I would sometimes bring my video camera (a tool I’d never really used before). I’d walk amidst the density of “suchness” – dense with noise, human population and something more. Not just interesting because it was foreign or I was a foreigner, but potent, as if less of some life-force has been drained from it, as if Phnom Penh was a mountain before strip mining ravaged it… or a city before freeways had been put up (which it is).

As soon as something stopped me, I knew it. A kind of double-take. Sometimes a street-vendor boiling eggs, sometimes a seamstress working. The double take told me I had to stop, even if I didn’t want to. “Hello,” I would say, explaining in my mangled Khmer that I was making a documentary about life in Cambodia and may I film you? I was never refused, always received with humor or mild disbelief or astonishment.

One day, a “message” came – a kind of thought - that said: the footage must become a film and that its title must be Cambodia: Lord Mukpo’s Dream Time. Suddenly my imagination was galvanized, activated, seized or even ransacked by some energy - manic, as if I was receiving cosmic-espresso intravenously. And so on. Many hours of editing and melt-downs later I had what had become this film, something I never imagined or planned or thought of in the first place. Bill Scheffel