Published: June 29, 2019| 09:20 AM

Cambodian director Hong Khaou will be participating in the festival's main competition for the first time this year. His new work Monsoon, presented in its world premiere, suggestively expresses the inner rebirth of its lost hero, much like his debut Lilting, presented at the 49th KVIFF. The protagonist Kit is struggling with his feeling of rootlessness and an identity crisis. He cannot handle the foreign environment of his native Vietnam, to which he has returned after thirty years to scatter the ashes of his parents.

The director Khaou has quite a bit in common with his main character. As a child he had to flee from the Khmer Rouge with his family from Cambodia to neighbouring Vietnam. When the communists took over power there, his family kept going, moving to the UK. When writing the screenplay for Monsoon, the filmmaker was inspired by his own visit to Vietnam, which he went to see for the first time since childhood: "All of a sudden I could imagine what I would have done myself. Kit wants to understand what culture he belongs to, to understand the past that his parents have taken from him. But then he realises that his parents actually saved him. It is often said that you must return to the past and resolve it in order to move forward. But this return does not provide you with any definitive answers, it just changes you a bit inside. And you can learn not to yearn for the past, but to live with it."

The director believes that Monsoon could be the right movie for current times, when nationalists are on the rise and stereotypical images of refugees appear in the media: "I wanted to shoot the film so as to give audiences room to think about these issues and ideally come to their own conclusions."