After the documentary Golden Slumbers, where he tried to retrace the popular Cambodian cinema which disappeared during the Khmer Rouge dictatorship, Diamond Island is Davy Chou’s first fiction. After the ghosts of the past, he films the lures of the present.
« When I discovered Diamond Island in 2013, I immediately wished to make a film there, which gave my short film Cambodia 2099, a draft for Diamond Island. It is a huge real-estate project, a small city made up of modern and fancy buildings on a peninsula near Phnom Penh. It crystallises the high-speed development prevailing in Cambodia. What struck me, besides the kitschy architecture, was to see the hundreds of youngsters roaming at night, going around on their motorbikes in this unfinished site. They are excited to see the country’s rebirth; they look at the future with zest and innocence. They are between 17 and 25, uprooted from the countryside to lend a working hand and build the Cambodia of the future, which will anyway be too expensive for them.
Diamond Island is a very simple coming of age film, leaning on the teen-movie codes: flirting, gangs. It is a film about distances: that between boys and girls, between the lower and the upper world, between the hopes of the deluded youth and the realities of the country. I wanted to convey the brutal reality with warmth and generosity. The direction is perfectly tuned on the feelings of my characters. Without fearing heterogeneity, colours, mannerism.
All the actors are amateurs - the one playing Bora is a taxi driver. I spent four months wandering around in the streets of Phnom Penh in order to find them, also on Diamond Island and on Facebook. Giving them my trust and winning theirs in return was one on the best experiences connected to the film. »
