River Movie

By his own estimation, Amiel Courtin-Wilson's latest feature, Ruin, is “a beautiful, brutal, fable-like love story that just happened to be made in an unusual fashion”. That 'unusual' fashion was in Cambodia, shooting entirely in Khmer. Expanding the docudrama approach of 2012's Hail, Courtin-Wilson and co-director Michael Cody have fashioned a piece of pure cinema charting a pair of lawless lovers (Ros Mony and Sang Malen) fleeing from Phnom Penh along the Mekong.

“After we both premiered Hail in Venice, we flew to Cambodia. We had no idea what we were doing: was it going to be a Chris Marker essay film? A series of photographs? A short? All of the above?”

Through filmmaker Kulikar Sotho (The Last Reel), a “force of nature” who served as on the ground producer and gateway to Cambodia, Cody and Courtin-Wilson started interviewing a “ridiculous array” of subjects: “everyone from NGO employees to rural fishermen, ex-police officers, ex-child sex workers, ex-gang bangers who'd been deported from America and dropped back in Cambodia”.

“It was really an experiment in sheer momentum, and seeing what we could get done if we were there, on the ground. The narrative was more about trying to push a style, a certain kind of methodology; to see just how fast and chaotic and loose we could swing it.”

Cody, who had spent time in Cambodia as foreign correspondent and photographer, was hyper-aware of “the potential minefield of two white male filmmakers coming to Cambodia and making a story about locals”. But Courtin-Wilson cut his teeth making documentaries – 2000's Chasing Buddha, 2008's Bastardy, 2010's Ben Lee: Catch My Disease – and is used to being an observer, “letting other people tell their stories”. But Ruin found him directing two people he'd met only two weeks before they started shooting and with whom he struggled to communicate. Eventually, that 'language barrier' led to long, improvised takes of little to no dialogue; with the supposed 'limitation' of language becoming liberating.

Just as Courtin-Wilson was free to shoot improvised takes, so was his co-director. “Working with a co-director is always going to be potentially perilous,” Courtin-Wilson admits. “But our answer to any argy-bargy was: you shoot what you want, I'll shoot what I want, and we'll work it out in the edit. Then we had three editors working on it, so there was five of us in the edit suite, working through... over 150 hours of footage. It could've been a potential nightmare. But it worked out really well, because the spirit of the project was just to work really quickly, and really instinctively. Because it was made so instinctively, and put together with such rapidity, there wasn't time for anything to become overly precious.”