Film festivals in Laos and Cambodia

The Luang Prabang Film Festival is over, and the next has already started: The Cambodian Film Festival. It shows movies in many cinemas (yes, Cambodia has cinemas other than Laos), it is in the capital, all screenings are free. The best Lao movie so far, At The Horizon, will be screen there as well.

It is sometimes good to see whats going on in neighboring countries and maybe learn from this. For example, I still don't understand why the Luang Prabang Film Festival is not in Vientiane, where the film industry is and where the audience is. In Cambodia, people go to the movies because the want to see it. In Luang Prabang, most of the audience are tourists who are there anyway - and last year the screening beside the night market were quite empty.

Slate Magazine about NGOs - worth reading in Laos as well

I am not a fan of NGOS and do-gooders and I will not become one. Yes, there are some projects doing good and really sustainable work, but they are a minority. Most international organizations wasting time and money. (I actually wonder if there is a statistic about the percentage of GDP of NGO projects what could measure the impact)

A very good insight delivered Slate Magazine with an excellent article.

Some quotes I really liked while consistent with my own observations:

WA says on its website that it works with villagers who "once were forced to roam the forest as hunters and loggers, diminishing Cambodia's environmental heritage, [and who] now have legal jobs as guides and operators of sustainable trekking, mountain-biking, and river boat tours."..."The wholesale destruction of Cambodia's environment is an important issue, but hunting and poaching by people eking out an existence in the forest isn't the problem," says a Western expatriate with extensive experience in land issues. "The primary causes are the government issuing massive land concessions to developers and wide-scale logging."

"The NGOs desperately want access and the basic equation is that the government grants it to them in exchange for their silence about corruption or anything else remotely controversial,"