7PM: CAMBODIAN AND FILIPINO SHORTS – Within the last five years, young Cambodian filmmakers have started to successfully explore the short film genre. Be our guest for the Meta premiere screening of two short films by theatre director Soung Sopheak (Khmer Arts Action). CHAMPA and PASSWORD involve a cast of young Cambodian martial artists. Director and cast will be in attendance. Q&A. This is followed by Lav Dias’ BUTTERFLIES HAVE NO MEMORIES (2009, 40 min). Shot in bleak monochrome, the Filipino auteur stages a collision between new world and old when a young expatriate returns to the decaying Philippine village where she was raised. Coming from Canada with some nice clothes and a fancy camera, the unnamed girl uses her trip as an excuse to indulge in exoticism and nostalgia, snapping pictures of old locations, old friends, and the ruins of the local mine, which ceased production when her bossman father decamped for greener pastures. Things are a little trickier, however, for the dejected villagers she’s employing in this living history memorial, thanks both to the economic collapse caused by the mine’s departure and the river-ruining toxins it left behind.

8.30PM: DOCUMENTARY - The renowned Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid is finalizing the designs for the Sleuk Rith Institute in Phnom Penh – an enormous wooden building financed by donations, which will contain a museum with changing exhibitions, a document archive, library and a leadership school. The memorial is the vision of Youk Chhang, a human-rights activist and the man behind the Documentation Centre of Cambodia, a research institute linked to Yale University, which houses one million documents detailing atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge. UK director Alan Yentob profiles the architect for the documentary ZAHA HADID – WHO DARES WINS (2013, 71 min). Born in Baghdad in 1950 and based in London, she is now one of a handful of global superstar designers who have changed the way people think about the world through buildings.