Selected for Critics' Week at Cannes 2016, “Diamond Island” is the first feature-length film from Davy Chou, a filmmaker born in France but with family roots in Cambodia, and the author of the documentary “Golden Slumbers” (2012) about the “golden age” of Cambodian cinema in the 60s and 70s (practically destroyed by the Khmer Rouge Dictatorship). The film builds on his earlier short film – "Cambodia 2099" (2014), shown at the Directors' Fortnight in Cannes 2014 and winner of the Grand Prix award in Vila do Conde that same year. Some of the scenes in this film were shot in the same locations as in the short film. It is about present day Cambodia, especially the country’s youth, and its transformation at every level – socially, economically and culturally. The role of the family has changed, there have been migratory movements and there have been changes to the urban landscape and to people’s identity – as in other countries of Southeast Asia. With the depth that a full length feature allows, Chou documents this turmoil through the story of a boy who leaves his village to go and work on the construction site of a luxury development project, for the nouveau-riche and ostentatious, in the proto-futuristic capital Phnom Penh. It's as if somehow “Cambodia 2099” (the idea not the film) materialized into a dream come true of consumerist capitalism, more aggressively called “Diamond Island”. The insularity of the place reflects the elitism and the exclusivity of the project. Dreams and the desire to escape on one hand, questions about the future on the other. The cinema of Davy Chou explores both these themes. The USA (in the previous short film), Malaysia, and “Diamond Island” itself, are metaphorically a dream “under construction”. A penchant for realism is notable in the portrayal of poverty, child labour, appalling housing, and the contrast between rich and poor. There are echoes of Buñuel’s “Los Olvidados”, above all in the scenes of the children immersed in a landscape of city rubble. Chou demonstrates a particular interest in melodrama, in the development of the characters and the melancholic atmosphere of the city in which they function. The poetry of these scenes is enhanced by the neon colours of the night, a reminder of some American cinema in the 70s and 80s. A stand out character is Solei, the brother of Bora who is financially supported by an ambiguous American sponsor and about whom someone comments that nobody knows him well. Shrouded in mystery and gloom, he brings to mind the older brother in Coppola’s “Rumble Fish”. If Rithy Panh was for good reason the standard-bearer for the best Cambodian cinema we have seen, Chou is definitely one of the names to watch from now on. (FN)