5 Questions with Allison Chhorn
Allison Chhorn is a filmmaker and multi-disciplinary artist incorporating video, installation, photography, painting and music composition. Her work explores themes of migrant displacement, trauma and the repetition of memory through visual media. She holds an Honours degree in Visual Arts from UniSA.
Her work has screened at Adelaide Film Festival, OzAsia Festival, FELTspace and Sydney Film Festival. The Plastic House is her first solo mid-length film, which had its international premiere at Visions du Réel.
Still from The Plastic House (Allison Chhorn, 2019)
No.1
What spurred the idea for The Plastic House?
Around the time I started thinking about the film, I was still just learning about filmmaking—making shorts and helping with other productions. I was also living and working on the farm that you see in the film, which had been my home for about fifteen years or so. During my time spent pruning and picking, I started thinking about how I could capture the atmosphere in the greenhouse.
There were also cracks appearing in the house I lived in. It was so old that a part of the ceiling had fallen down in the living room. At the same time, the plastic roof of the greenhouse was often ripped apart by strong winds.
No.2
You wrote, photographed, edited, scored and performed in The Plastic House alongside your Cambodian family and relatives. Were there particular reasons why you chose to do it this way, and what was the process like?
For me, it felt natural to work alone. It was more comfortable and accessible working this way. You have the freedom to make mistakes and not be pressured by anything else. The only real challenge was trying to film myself. But I envisioned how I would move within the frame and did a number of takes, checking each shot and making small adjustments as I went along.
My way of making art really comes from a DIY methodology, possibly traced back to my parents. Even though they're not artists, I believe their history of survival as refugees means that they’ve always been able to make something out of nothing: making household items out of found material, producing vegetables, cooking from what they've grown, sewing old clothes, etc.
So The Plastic House was a film made with what I already had, both on an emotional and practical level.
No.3
The film is billed as a ‘docu-fiction’, and which you say in another interview “fuse reality and fiction in order to create another kind of poetic truth”. Can you speak more to this?
In Werner Herzog's Minnesota Declaration (1999), he describes facts as almost surface information and poetic, ecstatic truth; as something more profound and elusive that can only be found through imagination. I’m interested in our personal relationship to people, places and our memory of them—memory as imagination formed from the past. I believe that memory is a kind of personal truth.
In The Plastic House, it is the imagination of fear in particular that plays out on screen. The cracks in the house were real and the tears in the greenhouse happened often, but in reality didn’t occur as dramatically as it does in the film. For me, it’s somehow easier to imagine the worst happening when you don't know the whole story and are only given fragments of information. Maybe it’s an unconscious way to mentally brace yourself if something bad does happen.
No.4
Your next project, After Years—a film about the experiences of the Cambodian diaspora across the world—is currently in the works. Tell us a little bit more about it.
A lot of questions arose after making The Plastic House, especially around silence and absence in Cambodian culture. I had caught up with another Cambodian-Australian friend that I hadn't seen for a long time, as she lives interstate. We talked about how our parents’ history has been passed down to us so imperceptibly but at the same time had influenced almost our entire lives.
This led me to think about other Cambodian families around the world. How has surviving the Khmer Rouge affected how they live after so many years and how has it manifested across generations? Are they living in a perpetual state of (often unacknowledged) PTSD or have they found ways to heal and learn from their experiences? What echoes of the past remains in the present?
At this stage, After Years is also planned to be a docu-fiction or hybrid film, which will reimagine scenes and situations so as to protect the details of real people.
No.5
Which filmmakers and artists do you consider your influences?
A lot of filmmakers from around the world inspire me, such as Mati Diop, Christian Petzold and Lucrecia Martel, whose works are informed by their cultural identity but are universally celebrated.
I’m also drawn to a lot of Asian filmmakers like Naomi Kawase, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and the Taiwanese New Wave: Tsai Ming-liang, Hou Hsiao-hsien and the late Edward Yang. They have a certain sensibility and poetic spirituality embedded in the fabric of their films which appropriately portrays themes such as repression, obligation to family, regret and yearning. Their films construct an architecture of space and time. I specifically admire how they frame characters through door frames or reflected off windows, surrounded by their environment, as if to suggest the socioeconomic/cultural system they live in will always structure how they live their lives, often conflicting with their personal desires.
In Edward Yang's Yi Yi (2000), a character says watching movies adds years to your life because you get to experience so much more than you could in reality. Watching films is my film school. I really find a place of solace in cinema.
The Plastic House is screening at this year’s Sydney Film Festival from now till 21 June. Watch the trailer below, or find out more at the SFF website.