Jessica Kiang There is an eerie, otherworldly beauty to the opening shot of Kavich Neang’s “White Building.” Accompanied by the pressure-cooker whine that introduces the more uncanny sections of Jean-Charles Bastion’s score, a drone camera, steady as though it were mounted on tracks in the sky, drifts over the eponymous structure, looking down.
Even just the rooftop of this vast, scabbed Phnom Penh apartment complex seems to have a thousand stories to tell — it’s perhaps little wonder that Neang’s melancholic, perplexed, slightly ponderous feature debut gets a little lost navigating them.Seen from this angle, the building — Neang’s childhood home, which recurred in his shorts and documentaries, and of which he amassed quite a bit of.
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