Popular visions of Cambodia: Angelina Jolie, Hollywood star, swinging through vast fake caverns in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (Simon West, 2001), a fictional adventure based on a video game. Another view: black and white images, mug shots, thousands of anonymous Khmer faces pinned to gloomy prison walls. This is the ‘meaning’ of Cambodia to most Westerners, reflected in the two most common tourist experiences: the ancient temples of Angkor Wat near Siem Reap, the torture and execution centre Tuol Sleng in Phnom Penh. Ancient monuments, modern genocide: few know, or could imagine, that this country once was entertained by a wild escapist romantic cinema which grew, flourished and disappeared in the space of little more than a decade. Among the small national film industries of Southeast Asia, Cambodia's has been one of the least known.

This chapter offers an overview of cinema in Cambodia especially during the period regarded as its ‘golden age’, and discusses the specific nature of stardom in that era. As is the case with popular cinema everywhere, it was a cinema where stars could shine. The basic structures of stardom, familiar from Hollywood cinema, emerged, but in the Cambodian case distinct and unique inflections arose from the historical moment of this cinema's existence. The great stars of Cambodian cinema embodied special qualities which came from their own charisma and skills. However, we also now recognise them as spectres, ghostly reminders of a past gone but not forgotten. These stars live on in memorial fragments today, bearing a tragic load through the knowledge of their fates, and the fates of their films. Most of the great stars (and directors, writers, musicians, dancers) did not merely fade away into the obscurity of age, decline and change of fashion. Instead, they disappeared in 1975 when the Khmer Rouge eliminated them along with their glittering and fantastical films. Today, we can recuperate only a glimpse of the stars and the films. A labour of research and memory slowly fills the archive with moments, passages, images and reminders. The painstaking reconstruction and appreciation of Cambodian cinema has been developing through archival searches around the world and interviews with the few remaining survivors.