Phnom Penh Lullaby

Hardship. Regret. Pain.: Three central themes brilliantly brought to life by Polish documentarian Pawel Kloc. By combining hidden camera footage with gritty nighttime shots, where blackness threatens to wash out any glimmer of hope, Kloc’s film evoked authentic feelings of somberness to which no narrative film has ever done for me before. Not all films exist to make people feel better about themselves. Sometimes it’s necessary to see a film where happiness is trumped by sadness. In fact, sometimes capturing life’s more somber side and embracing it for 103 minutes is the more difficult of tasks. When done right, such as with Phnom Penh Lullaby, these conjurings of tremendous sympathetic anguish and unease came all too easy.