Best Cambodian movies

A Prayer Before Dawn (2018)

The amazing true story of Billy Moore, an English boxer incarcerated in Thailand’s most notorious prison. Thrown into a world of drugs and violence, he finds his best chance to escape is to fight his way out in prison Muay Thai tournaments.

Flight Crew (2016)

A story about bravery, self-sacrifice and human dignity put on trial by the merciless power of nature. A young pilot is fired from military air force after disobeying an absurd order. He gets a job as a co-pilot with a civil airline. Being brutally honest and direct, he is not on best terms with his new colleagues. During a flight to Asia his crew receives a distress message from a volcanic island and makes a decision to attempt a rescue mission. Will it be a success? Will they survive the disaster? They have a single chance to find that out: by being a team and sticking up for one another.

Hex (2018)

A couple's holiday romance is thrown into chaos as they are afflicted by a malicious force.

Jailbreak (2017)

What started as a simple escort mission will soon turn to chaos as the prisoners of Koh Kla take over the prison grounds. A special task force gets trapped in the prison will have to fight their way out for survival, to protect a key witness.

Enemies of the People (2009)

The Khmer Rouge slaughtered nearly two million people in the late 1970s. Yet the Killing Fields of Cambodia remain unexplained. Until now. Enter Thet Sambath, an unassuming, yet cunning, investigative journalist who spends a decade of his life gaining the trust of the men and women who perpetrated the massacres. From the foot soldiers who slit throats to Pol Pot's right-hand man, the notorious Brother Number Two, Sambath records shocking testimony never before seen or heard. Having neglected his own family for years, Sambath's work comes at a price. But his is a personal mission. He lost his parents and his siblings in the Killing Fields. Amidst his journey to discover why his family died, we come to understand for the first time the real story of Cambodia's tragedy.

A Fistful Of Pebbles (2015)

A Fistful of Pebbles won the 3rd prize in the SEA Tropfest Film Festival 2015. The story is about a mysterious man who finds himself in the muddy monsoon in a village terrorized by a local gangster. When he’s unwittingly drawn into the village’s problem and the beautiful daughter of the village Chief is about to be taken, the hero takes matters into his own hands… with a fistful of pebbles.

Doi Boy (2023)

Sorn, an ethnic Shan sex worker, tries to build a future in Chiang Mai, Thailand, as a refugee far from home, but he is drawn into a complex relationship with one client, an investigator probing a political activist.

The Prey (2018)

An innocent man sentenced to rot in a Cambodian jail is released for the sadistic pleasure of twisted trophy hunters and forced to fight - or die.

Meeting with Pol Pot (2024)

Democratic Kampuchea (Cambodia) - 1978. Three French journalists are invited by the Khmer Rouge to conduct an exclusive interview of the regime's leader, Pol Pot. The country seems ideal. But behind the Potemkin village, the Khmer Rouge regime is declining and the war with Vietnam threatens to invade the country. The regime is looking for culprits, secretly carrying out a large scale genocide. Under the eyes of the journalists, the beautiful picture cracks, revealing the horror. Their journey progressively turns into a nightmare. Freely inspired by journalist Elizabeth Becker's account in When the war was over.

The Scarecrow (2023)

Turn (2014)

Bngvel is the real-life story of Phally, a Cambodian man struggling against the odds to be a good husband and father. Never being able to provide enough for his card-playing wife, he heads to the big city in search of better employment opportunities, only to find the more he earns, the more he spends. Numbing out with beer and girls, he comes to a point of crisis that shakes him up, and he becomes determined to make amends.

The Witch (2018)

The story takes place during the Longvek era. Raj, a tycoon, and Tep Leak, his wife and pregnant with two kids, live in harmony until one fateful day.

Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell (2012)

Under the Khmer Rouge regime, Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch, directed the M13 prison for four years, before becoming the head of S21, the terrifying death machine that eliminated Khmer Rouge opponents. Some 12,280 Cambodians met their deaths here. In July 2010, Duch was the first Khmer leader to appear before an international court, which sentenced him to 35 years in prison. He appealed the sentence. While Duch waited for his new trial, Rithy Panh questioned him in depth.

Eskape (2021)

The refugee camp Khao-I-Dang on the border of Cambodia and Thailand was known as the “hill of death.” Hundreds of thousands of people fleeing famine or certain death under the Khmer Rouge arrived there exhausted. Among them were a mother and her baby daughter, who later found a home in France. Fourty years later, the daughter—filmmaker Neary Adeline Hay—follows the trail back in a highly personal, elegantly filmed journey through their past.

Khmerica (2025)

Joker, Kookie and Djumbo are “Khmericans”: Cambodian refugees who grew up in the United States and were deported back to Cambodia after serving a prison sentence.

Fathers (2020)

A father's heart is as big as the whole world, it is said. A disabled cycle trishaw driver who has lost a leg is lovingly raising his two children alone as their mother ran away. The little money he earns on the dirty streets of the pulsating city is just enough to survive. When the little son fell ill and had to go to the hospital, the desperate father could not afford the money for medical treatment. He now has to take on other jobs, collect rubbish from the street or donate blood. Meanwhile, a young, committed female doctor is taking care of the little boy, whose father, in turn, cannot understand that she is doing this "man's job". Based on a true story!

A River Changes Course (2013)

In her feature directorial debut, Kalyanee Mam, the cinematographer for the Academy Award–winning documentary Inside Job, explores the damage rapid development has wrought in her native Cambodia on both a human and environmental level.

Duetto (2014)

Life is like a duet: you need the right half to make a performance beautiful.

Tenement (2024)

Following her mother’s death, manga artist Sorya travels to her ancestral home in Phnom Penh, with hopes of reconnecting with her distant family and using the visit as inspiration for her work. All goes well initially. Renting an apartment in Metta, a rundown Khmer Rouge-era housing complex, her visit to her maternal relatives finds her welcomed with open arms. But Sorya’s waking hours in the apartment and its surroundings are punctuated by terrifying, bloody visions, almost as though she were a conduit for horrors of the past wanting to seep into the present.

Sunrise in My Mind (2021)

A young woman working late at night at a beauty salon gives into her restrained interest in a young man who spends his evenings driving Phnom Penh's streets by motorbike as a delivery man.

The Storm Makers (2014)

The film traces modern-day slavery in Cambodia by disclosing the fate of this young woman and following, in parallel, the daily lives of two human traffickers, a local recruiter and the head of an agency. Cambodian people call these traffickers Mey Kechol: The Storm Makers.

White Building (2021)

SAMNANG, 20, faces the demolition of his lifelong home in Phnom Penh and the pressures from family, friends, and neighbors which arise and intersect in this moment of sudden change.

Current Sea (2020)

A feature-length, environmental thriller that follows investigative journalist, Matt Blomberg, and ocean activist, Paul Ferber, in their dangerous efforts to create a marine conservation area and combat the relentless tide of illegal fishing. Along the way a new generation of Cambodian environmentalists are inspired to create a better life for their people.

Monsoon Lover (2023)

Retreating to Cambodia after a failed relationship, American Thomas McIntrye becomes immersed in Cambodia's dangerous and pervasive sex trade. There he falls in love with a woman who helps him to regain his dignity.

Rent Boy (2023)

Pai, a handsome young man but an orphan, lives with his uncle. Until he had to go to work as a sex worker in a bar, with Bora, his close friend, looking for customers. Until one day, Bora took Pai to see customers in a hotel. Confused about room numbers, Pai then went into the room of Jenny, Bora's younger sister. After that night Jenny and Pai have a chance to get close and begin to have feelings for each other, but Bora has to try to block them out in every possible way.

Paper Cannot Wrap Up Embers (2007)

During the last half-century, Cambodia has witnessed genocide, decades of war and the collapse of social order. Now, documentary filmmaker Rithy Panh looks at an irreparable tragedy that is less visible, yet no less pervasive: the spiritual death that results when young women are forced into prostitution. Angry and impassioned, PAPER CANNOT WRAP UP EMBERS presents the searing stories of poor Asian women whose lives were violated and their destinies destroyed when their bodies were turned into items of sexual commerce.

Last Night I Saw You Smiling (2019)

Kavich Neang documents the final days of the White Building in Phnom Penh, an architectural landmark he had lived in since birth.

Golden Slumbers (2011)

Over three million Cambodians died in the genocide between 1975 and 1979. The Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror also decimated a homegrown film industry that had flourished since 1960: movie theaters were bombed, film prints were destroyed and artists were executed. In Golden Slumbers, French-Cambodian filmmaker Davy Chou mourns this loss of lives and culture, but balances the somber material with a playfulness that honors the lush melodramas and mythic adventures of the glory years.

Bangkok Thirteen (2016)

Pia is a girl with a sixth sense. Her ability to see ghosts leads her to become the key to unlock 13 haunted secrets in Bangkok. She joins a paranormal TV show in hopes of finding out the truth behind her strange gift. The decision brings her to realised dark secrets of 13 locations, which are all connected to her in some ways. Could she find a way out of this mess, or even what’s setting everything in motion? Is it a gift or determination that brings upon her strange talent? Is this just one big game being dealt by fate’s hand?

Iva (2012)

Silent film about a young girl and her pet dog.