Allison Chhorn

"As abstract shapes come into focus, dim memories surface. With Blind Body, Allison Chhorn offers an impressionistic portrait of her grandmother Kim Nay, a survivor of the Khmer Rouge. Partially blind, Kim spends her days in a mostly sonic and textural world, in which the sound of rain, the voices of Khmer radio, and distant birdsong summon the sensations of a lost homeland." - New York Film Festival / Film at Lincoln Center

A teenage boy stoner lives with his single mother.

Fragments of recreated archival footage depicts daily life along the Mekong River in the countryside of Cambodia. Cooking, planting rice, children at school and crossing the river is captured on Super 8, yet the fictional time period is unknown. An imagined flash flood submerges everything. “Where is the old house? Do you go through here?” A voice repeats over and over again. All is not lost as water drops ripple open portals of memories that reemerge from the depths of the river.

Skin Shade Night Day explores the daily routine and rituals practised by the artist’s Cambodian-Australian family, which are reperformed and documented through a process of embodied empathy. Acts of service, such as gardening and cooking, play out as echoes from the past across a sound and image installation displayed in a shadehouse. Spectres, shadows and aural textures conjure up impressions of a place that remembers how its inhabitants once lived.

Classic coming of age and iconic bird leaving the nest comingle and mix in this film as Christian boy Stanley discovers new experiences after entering the gay scene.

Constructing a solitary reality by imagining what life would be like after the passing of her parents, director Allison Chhorn's intricate docu-fiction chronicles her own process carrying on work in the family's titular 'plastic house'.

"As abstract shapes come into focus, dim memories surface. With Blind Body, Allison Chhorn offers an impressionistic portrait of her grandmother Kim Nay, a survivor of the Khmer Rouge. Partially blind, Kim spends her days in a mostly sonic and textural world, in which the sound of rain, the voices of Khmer radio, and distant birdsong summon the sensations of a lost homeland." - New York Film Festival / Film at Lincoln Center

A teenage boy stoner lives with his single mother.

Fragments of recreated archival footage depicts daily life along the Mekong River in the countryside of Cambodia. Cooking, planting rice, children at school and crossing the river is captured on Super 8, yet the fictional time period is unknown. An imagined flash flood submerges everything. “Where is the old house? Do you go through here?” A voice repeats over and over again. All is not lost as water drops ripple open portals of memories that reemerge from the depths of the river.

Skin Shade Night Day explores the daily routine and rituals practised by the artist’s Cambodian-Australian family, which are reperformed and documented through a process of embodied empathy. Acts of service, such as gardening and cooking, play out as echoes from the past across a sound and image installation displayed in a shadehouse. Spectres, shadows and aural textures conjure up impressions of a place that remembers how its inhabitants once lived.

Classic coming of age and iconic bird leaving the nest comingle and mix in this film as Christian boy Stanley discovers new experiences after entering the gay scene.

Classic coming of age and iconic bird leaving the nest comingle and mix in this film as Christian boy Stanley discovers new experiences after entering the gay scene.

Constructing a solitary reality by imagining what life would be like after the passing of her parents, director Allison Chhorn's intricate docu-fiction chronicles her own process carrying on work in the family's titular 'plastic house'.

A fifteen minute black-and-white film.

Single-channel video, 4-channel audio.

Adelaide filmmaker Allison Chhorn (NYFF 2020) visualises Cambodian-American poet Monica Sok’s poem Letter to the Moon Regarding False Intimacy with an intimate fictional drama of a mother and daughter separated by geography. Shot across Australia, the USA and Canada, Missing springs from research into the Facebook group “Missing People from the Khmer Rouge,” where diaspora members still search for Cambodian family members missing since the genocide.

A dress. A couple. He holds on to the past but does she see a future? Or will this be the last time?

The garden is a place for growing plants and intergenerational family members to be nurtured by daily rituals. Captured over changing seasons on Super 8 film, the personal archive is projected onto leftover tea-dyed muslin reminiscent of dried plants. These ghost-like hanging pieces become fragments of memories. Tactile and atmospheric, the installation reveals multiple timelines of different stages of life overlapping visually, sonically and temporally. Preservation turns into inevitable decay and circles back again to new growth.