At a large demonstration, an enraged and newly landless protester points at the powerful man and demands the truth.
“Tell me what your relationship with the Member of Parliament is!” he shouts.
But when “Stone Wall of Love”—a Thai movie dubbed in Khmer—begins playing at Vimeantip Cinema Saturday, the words “member of parliament” will have disappeared. Instead, a sanitized version will use only his name, eliminating politics from the story.
Similarly, another scene—in which a squatter asks another official, “Why are you moving us?”—has been changed to the seemingly less jarring “Why are you doing this to us?”
Like most foreign movies played on Cambodian television and in the country’s only movie theater, “Stone Wall of Love” has gone through a translator, a group of voice-over actors and a number of official watchdogs at the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts.
Seventy to 80 percent of movies played in Cambodia come from abroad, keeping video production companies and television stations busy six days a week translating movies and television serials into Khmer.
And with expanded television broadcasting hours and the opening of Vimeantip earlier this year, the government is also becoming busier, making sure, they say, that the increasing number of incoming movies do not damage Khmer culture, the morals of Cambodia’s youth or the nation’s political stability.
Perhaps the dialogue and scenes from “Stone Wall of Love” resemble Cambodia’s present Nonetheless, politics is not a “big concern” these days for the government’s movie watchers, said Moung Sokhan, deputy director of the Cinema and Cultural Diffusion Department at the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts. More effort is made at rooting out pornography and violence, he said.
The department has four rooms devoted to reviewing movies, each with a TV and VCR. That could increase to several more rooms in the coming months as the government steps up its monitoring of movies, Moung Sokhan said.
Typically, two to five people will watch a movie. Depending on the movie’s content, those officials could be from the ministries of education, defense, interior, information or health. Sometimes, it is just a few Ministry of Culture officials.
There is no official list of specific things to look out for, Moung Sokhan said. Generally, anything that doesn’t respect Cambodia’s customs and morality must be cut out.
“We don’t instruct them,” he said. “They know what they are looking for.”
In one example, Ministry of Defense officials banned a Thai serial because it featured an Apsara dancer—a key Khmer cultural icon—as an evil, blood-sucking ghost that invaded Thailand from Cambodia. The ministry was worried the portrayal would harm relations between the two countries.
In late 2000, the government issued a decree to television stations ordering them to send all movies to the Ministry of Culture for approval. The government will begin enforcing a similar order to VCD shop and stall owners later this year, Moung Sokhan said.
“Step by step, our country is building the law,” he said.
The Cambodian film-making industry is turning out more movies—pleasing officials like Prime Minister Hun Sen who want to see more Cambodian culture on television. But it is still cheaper for television stations to buy the copyrights to feature movies and serials made in Hong Kong and Thailand, which can then be translated and dubbed in Phnom Penh.
Acquiring the rights to a Thai film costs about 50 percent less than the rights to a Cambodian film, Bun Sear, director of Dara Video Cambodia, said.
Competition between stations for advertising revenue may also discourage stations from running Khmer movies over the more popular foreign films that attract viewers.
That means most of the movies shown in Cambodia go through an ad hoc assembly line—from the distributor to the translator to the voice-over actors to the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts—before it is shown to Cambodians.
Dara Video is one of several video production studios in Phnom Penh that translates and dubs foreign movies and then sells them to television stations.
Three dubbing studios—one for Chinese, one for Thai and one for English-language movies—operate at the Dara Video office near Kampuchea Krom Boulevard. With several translators working out of their homes and 12 voice-over actors and actresses working full-time in unadorned, bedroom-sized studios, Dara can turn out one 90-minute movie a day in each of the three languages, Bun Sear said.
At TV5, translators and dubbers have a similar rate of production, finishing a 90-minute Thai serial every day, as well as Japanese-made cartoons that have been dubbed in Thai. Each serial has a script, written in longhand on about 70 pages of blank white paper with notations on when to sigh or stutter and when to use a certain emotion.
“Sometimes it can be difficult,” said Rin Yara, who does voice-overs for male supporting actors. “It can take up to one hour to finish dubbing 10 minutes of tape.”
They also find time to translate and dub Thai movies like “Stone Wall of Love” and “The Red Bicycle,” which played earlier this year at Vimeantip. It is here that the government-ordered changes were made last week to “Stone Wall of Love.”
But usually, translators and dubbers recognize what is acceptable to the government and will self-censor movies and serials before submitting it to the Ministry of Culture.
In another scene from “Stone Wall of Love,” TV5 translator Ma Serey knew to omit the words “political party” when members of a Thai political party burn down a house.
“In the translation, we don’t mention it,” he said. “Before, I would translate word for word. But we met with the Ministry of Culture and they informed us that we should correct things that affect the political situation.”
