Creator
Kulikar Sotho
Kulikar Sotho is a Cambodian director and producer who leads Hanuman Films and directed The Last Reel.
Kulikar Sotho is a Cambodian film director and producer who works through Hanuman Films and directed The Last Reel (2014).[1][2] She spent years as a line producer, fixer and translator on international productions in Cambodia before she began directing.[3]
Production work
Sotho entered the film industry in 1999 as a translator and fixer for the Lonely Planet television presenter Ian Wright.[3] She was the location liaison manager for the Cambodian shoot of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. She handled logistics, casting, production design, permits and Khmer lessons for Angelina Jolie and Daniel Craig. She was later brought onto the set as a second assistant director and directed more than 200 extras.[3] Hanuman Films, the company she founded, began work in 2000, and it arranged the filming of Tomb Raider in Cambodia.[4][5]
She went on to work as a line producer on documentaries, docudramas and feature films, and Hanuman Films lists her as a line producer on Tomb Raider and Wish You Were Here.[3][1] She has coordinated television documentaries for the BBC, Discovery, National Geographic and other international channels.[1][2] After 2000 she also worked as an interpreter and coordinator for foreign journalists and filmmakers researching the Khmer Rouge. For a BBC Timewatch drama about Pol Pot in 2004, she interviewed Khmer Rouge cadres and senior leaders. That project convinced her that she should tell her experiences in her own voice.[3][5]
Through Hanuman Films she produced Ruin, which won the Special Orizzonti Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 2013.[6][7] In 2009 she narrated performances of The Continuum: Beyond the Killing Fields, a theater and film project built on the survival story of Em Theay.[4]
Directing
Sotho first received the script of The Last Reel as a line producer for an American director who later withdrew. She chose to direct it herself, with a Cambodian voice.[3] The Khmer-language feature, released in 2014, was her debut as a director.[1][6] It deals with the different versions of the truth about the Khmer Rouge and Cambodia's civil war.[8] Sotho trained as a classical dancer, and she drew on that training for the visual style of the film within the film. She has said she made it to help Cambodia's younger generation understand the country's history.[3] The Last Reel won the Spirit of Asia Award at the 27th Tokyo International Film Festival in 2014 and the Black Dragon Award at the Far East Film Festival in 2015. It was Cambodia's submission for Best Foreign Language Film at the 88th Academy Awards.[6][7]
Sotho has described Cambodia as a male-dominated society in which women must work harder to be heard, and she has said her years as a line producer helped her earn the trust of her mostly male crew.[3]
In 2015 she was named one of three directors, representing Cambodia, for the first Asian Three-Fold Mirror omnibus, co-produced by the Japan Foundation Asia Center and the Tokyo International Film Festival. She said she wanted to make a film linking Japan and Cambodia.[6] Her contribution, Beyond the Bridge (2016), was part of Asian Three-Fold Mirror 2016: Reflections; Hanuman Films lists it as a feature film.[9][1]
For the 2020 anthology Mekong 2030, five short stories about the future of the Mekong River, she directed the Cambodian segment Soul River. It is a cautionary river journey set in 2030 in a remote part of northeastern Cambodia.[7][8]
Juries
In 2016 Sotho sat on the three-member jury for the International Documentaries category at the All Lights India International Film Festival.[2]
Works
- Mekong 2030 (Film)
- The Last Reel (Film)
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 Hanuman Films, Our Team
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Kulikar Sotho, Wikipedia
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 easternKicks, In Conversation with Kulikar Sotho: "I have to believe and feel in my heart..."
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Andy Brouwer, Andy's Cambodia blog, posts on Hanuman Films (2009)
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 The Japan Foundation Asia Center, The Last Reel and its Determinations: Through the Dark (Asia Hundreds)
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 The Japan Foundation Asia Center, The Japan Foundation Asia Center and Tokyo International Film Festival coproduce Asian Three-Fold Mirror
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 SeaShorts Film Festival, Opening Film (September 23, 2020)
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 M+, Mekong 2030 & Short (2023)
- ↑ Hanuman Films, Cinema With Soul