The Cinematheque

Vancouver Premiere

“An intoxicating blend of naturalism and dreamy stylization, rendering the ecstasies and agonies of late youth with remarkable attention to detail.”

Museum of Modern Art, New York

Like many young men from the Cambodian countryside, Bora leaves his native village to find work in Phnom Penh. He gets a construction job on Diamond Island, a new luxury development for the city’s rapidly-rising one percent. Working by day and chasing girls at night, Bora runs into his long-lost older brother Solei, who enjoys a suspiciously lavish lifestyle. Diamond Island is a stylized tour-de-force of sharp contrasts, pitting glorified shantytowns and dusty construction sites against glittering high-end nightclubs and the cool, neon ambience of Phnom Penh at night. While writer-director Davy Chou’s background in documentary serves him well in recording the complex realities of a rapidly developing, deeply unequal society, his eye is that of a masterful stylist. Most importantly, he never loses sight of the story, crafting a seductive coming-of-age tale for a constantly mutating world.