The film “White Building,”premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2021 and won the Orizzonti Award for Best Actor. It also gathers accolades from the BFI London Film Festival, Chicago International Film Festival, Busan International Film Festival, and Lisbon&Estoril Film Festival, among others. The film follows 20-year-old Samnang and his group of friends in a landmark tenement housing block in Phnom Penh, endearingly called the White Building. By narrating the harrowing experience of the building’s residents as they navigate the destruction of their homes, the film reveals the brutal realities of gentrification and the pitfall of progress in modern Cambodia.
Kavich NEANG (b. 1987, Phnom Penh, Cambodia) is a Cambodian filmmaker who first studied under the Cambodian legendary filmmaker Rithy Panh. Kavich joined Busan’s AsianFilm Academy in 2013. He co-founded the Anti-Archive film collective alongside Davy Chou and Steve Chen in 2014. Kavich joined Cannes Cinéfondation’s Residency in 2017-18. His 2019 documentary Last Night I Saw You Smiling won the NETPAC Award at IFFR, the Special Jury Prize at Jeonju, Best Image at Janela de Cinema, and two other awards at Tokyo FilmEx.