About the Film
The White Building was an iconic architectural structure built in 1963 to house civil servants in Cambodia’s Ministry of Culture, who were mainly artists and performers. It housed 493 families in Phnom Penh before urban redevelopment forced its demolition in 2017. As filmmaker Kavich Neang’s own family lived there and faced eviction, he transformed his story into the documentary, Last Night I Saw You Smiling (2019), which has now become an award-winning narrative feature.
As Neang says: "Last Night I Saw You Smiling influenced the feature. In the documentary, I felt passive with regard to the evacuation of the apartment where I lived with my parents, powerless to fight overwhelming forces. Whereas in the feature, I was able to reimagine those forces, create coherent characters and, in a way, fight despair and forgetting, in order to question audiences and provoke debate.”
Divided into three chapters, Blessings opens the film with the energetic spirit of the young generation. They are hip-hop dancers such as Samnang who aspires to use their talent to fund their future studies. Then it segues into Spirit House, a darker mid-section where Samnang’s relationship with his family is revealed. His father leads the building’s committee, bargaining for a better price to buy out their apartments, before the structure is torn down for redevelopment. A sense of decay abruptly discolours the brightness of the initial youth segment. When it rains, huge black patches appear on the apartment ceiling, a sign that leaking has infiltrated into the building’s structure. This blackness is mirrored in his father’s diabetic condition that deteriorates rapidly when his toe blackens. His leg is later amputated, and he loses his position as the committee leader. Soon the eviction begins.
In the final segment, Monsoon, we see Samnang’s family are back in their ancestral village. In an evocative shot, he's seen standing in the darkness of his village, silhouetted against lights, perhaps peaceful now with the ghosts of the past.
Philip Cheah