Film

Sleepwalking Through the Mekong

Sleepwalking Through the Mekong is a 2007 documentary by John Pirozzi that follows the Los Angeles band Dengue Fever on a trip to Cambodia.[1][2] The journey took the band to lead singer Chhom Nimol's home country during the 2005 Water Festival.[2]

Synopsis

Dengue Fever's music revives a psychedelic pop that thrived briefly in 1960s Cambodia, when musicians blended Western rock heard on the radio with Khmer melodies.[3] Many of those musicians were persecuted or killed by the Khmer Rouge, and the country's music scene was nearly wiped out.[3][4] The film is dedicated to the memory of those artists.[3]

For Chhom Nimol the trip is an emotional homecoming.[4] The band tours Phnom Penh and the countryside, plays live shows and performs and records with Cambodian master musicians who have worked to keep the Khmer sound alive.[2][1][3] They record music for the soundtrack with the blind musician Kong Nai, who plays the two-stringed guitar.[5] On one day they rehearse songs with schoolchildren at noon and stage a large outdoor concert that evening.[5] The film ends with the band and the Cambodian musicians in concert in a Phnom Penh slum.[3] The band's bassist, Senon Williams, said they chose to focus on the enjoyment of life in Cambodia because so many films had already been made about the Khmer Rouge regime.[5]

Coverage of the DVD release called the tour the first time a Western band had performed classic Cambodian rock of the 1960s and 1970s in Cambodia.[2][6]

Production and credits

John Pirozzi, an American director and cinematographer and a friend of the band, directed the film.[3] He had earlier been cinematographer on Matt Dillon's City of Ghosts.[5] The film was shot in 10 days with a small Cambodian crew.[3] Josh Otten and Pirozzi produced it, with J. Andrew Greenblatt and Nicholas Kalikow as executive producers, for Film 101 Productions and M80 Records.[7][1] It runs 68 minutes and is in English and Khmer.[1][7]

Release and reception

The film premiered at the Silver Lake Film Festival on May 5, 2007, and screened that year at the Tucson Film & Music Festival on September 3 and the Margaret Mead Film Festival on November 9.[8][2] It also played the Hawaiian International Film Festival, the Roskilde Festival, the Istanbul Museum of Fine Art and the Museum of Fine Art in Boston.[2][6] On March 3, 2008, UnionDocs presented it with Pirozzi and Dengue Fever.[9]

M80 Music released the film on April 14, 2009, as a two-disc set with a DVD and a CD soundtrack, through Nail Distribution and online through IODA.[2][6] The DVD extras include a band biography, live performances, comments from Pirozzi, and segments on the Water Festival, the coconut dance and Cambodia's master musicians.[2] The soundtrack pairs classic tracks by Ros Serey Sothea, Sinn Sisamouth and Meas Samoun with new material recorded by Tep Mary and Kong Nai with Dengue Fever, and two unreleased Dengue Fever instrumentals, "March of The Balloon Animals" and "Phnom Chisor Serenade."[2]

The Cambodia Town Film Festival in Long Beach headlined its Music Corner with the film on September 14, 2013, at the Art Theatre, alongside music videos by Bochan Huy, Laura Mam, Indradevi and Tiny Toones. The screening was followed by a question-and-answer session with members of the band.[4][10]

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 IMDb, Sleepwalking Through the Mekong (2007)
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 World Music Central, Dengue Fever Music Documentary Sleepwalking Through The Mekong to Be Released in April 2009
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 Time, A Dose of the Delta Blues (July 27, 2009)
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Cambodia Town Film Festival, 10,429 thoughts on " MUSICAL CORNER: Dengue Fever's 'Sleepwalking Through the Mekong' " (archived)
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 Style Weekly, Fever Dreams (April 15, 2009)
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 Khmerization, Bringing Dengue Fever home (April 2, 2009)
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Rotten Tomatoes, Sleepwalking Through the Mekong
  8. ↑ IMDb, Sleepwalking Through the Mekong (2007), release info
  9. ↑ UnionDocs, Sleepwalking Through The Mekong (March 3, 2008)
  10. ↑ The Hi-Lo, Cambodia's Lost Psych Rock Scene Finds Rebirth in Contemporary Acts (August 30, 2013)
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This page was last edited on 26 September 2026, at 23:42.