Urban Lens 2020 | Kavich Neang in conversation with Gautam Bhan

Описание: Kavich Neang will be in conversation with Gautam Bhan about his film ‘Last Night I Saw You Smiling’, practice and more. For more details about the film & filmmaker, visit: https://iihsurbanlens.in/portfolio-it...

The Urban Lens Film Festival is a one-of-a-kind international film festival that brings together filmmakers, academics and urban practitioners to dialogue with each other on cinema and the urban experience. Curated by the IIHS Media Lab, the festival has presented 174 films from various genres from 35 countries in 30 languages.

The seventh edition of the festival will be hosted online from 1 – 6 December 2020, in association with the Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan and the Danish Cultural Institute.

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Synopsis :
“We’re used to seeing a house for its roof, windows, and walls. But in the end, as we move out of here, it breaks my heart.” Filmmaker Kavich Neang’s father is one of the hundreds of residents who must leave the iconic White Building in Phnom Penh. This housing block bore witness to a tremendous series of events: the young nation’s Golden Age; a traumatic breakdown under a radical regime; decades of cultural revival centered within its walls; and, the rapid pace of capitalist development that would ultimately lead to its demise. Now the once radiant walls are grey and damaged. Neang, born here in 1987 and raised inside, once dreamed of shooting a fiction film here, but reality overtook his plan. It’s now the location for his first full-length documentary. When demolition comes, it’s all just a memory.

Director’s Bio :
Kavich Neang (director and cinematographer) was born in 1987 and raised in Phnom Penh’s landmark White Building. His first two shorts were documentaries produced by Rithy Panh: A Scale Boy (2011), and Where I Go (2013). In 2013, he joined Busan’s Asian Film Academy, and in 2014, he co-founded Anti-Archive. In 2015, he directed two short fictions, Three Wheels (premiere: Busan), and Goodbye Phnom Penh. In 2018, his short fiction, New Land Broken Road, premiered in Singapore. Kavich has joined Talents Tokyo, Visions du Reel’s Docs-in-Progress, and Cannes Cinéfondation’s Residency. In 2019, his full-length documentary Last Night I Saw You Smiling won the NETPAC Award at IFFR, the Special Jury Prize at Jeonju, Best Image at Janela de Cinema and two awards at Tokyo FilmEx. He is now completing his first narrative feature, White Building, due to premiere in 2021.

Conversationalist's Bio :
Part of the School of Human Development at IIHS, Gautam teaches, researches and writes on the politics of urban poverty and inequality, urban and planning theory, housing, and identity and social practice. At IIHS, Gautam has taught under several programmes, including the Urban Fellows Programme, the Urban Practitioners Programme and the PWP-UD.
He anchors the role of IIHS as a National Resource Centre, with the Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation and is part of IIHS’ work in affordable housing policy and practice. His previous research has focused on displacement and resettlement of the urban poor in Delhi and his new work engages with regimes of urban welfare and social security, including work on urban health. He has been an active part of urban social movements on sexuality as well as housing rights and currently advises and trains governmental agencies at local, state and national levels on housing policy.

He is the author of In the Public’s Interest: Evictions, Citizenship and Inequality in Contemporary Delhi (University of Georgia Press 2017; Orient Blackswan 2017), co-editor of the Routledge Companion to Planning in the Global South (Routledge 2018), co-author of Swept off the Map: Surviving Eviction and Resettlement in Delhi (2008), and co-editor of Because I have a Voice: Queer Politics in India (2006), in addition to numerous academic articles. He also writes frequently in public intellectual spaces and frequently in Caravan, India Today, Tehelka, Indian Express, the Hindustan Times and the Times of India.