A reduced setting – a young man alone in a wooden hut, where tableaus involving a wide range of objects appear and disappear again – serves as the backdrop for this cinematic meditation about the state of exile and the solitude and isolation that go with it, to say nothing of the lasting pain. A condensed, poetic commentary discusses the effects of the Khmer Rouge on an adolescent and the party’s dangerous ideology. EXIL is an attempt to grasp the past in order to live in the present, a process of self-discovery by way of the imaginary.
(arsenal kino)