KOUN SREI
2026 · 2m
Directed by Linda Nguon
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, family
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Kim, 63, raises her daughter Tam alone in a country she does not master; between daily gestures, silences and misunderstandings, Tam's unease and her place beside her mother take shape, as prayers and offerings to Kim's late father celebrate the beauty of gestures and family memory across three generations.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone's going to call this a tender family portrait, but what Nguon's actually doing is weaponizing silence—every unspoken thing between Kim and Tam becomes more violent than dialogue ever could, and that's weirdly perverse for a film about prayers and memory.
Nguon positions herself in a deliberate lineage of diasporic cinema that honors ritual and intergenerational trauma through formal restraint; the edit between gesture and prayer, between the living and the venerated dead, demonstrates curatorial intelligence about how image-making itself becomes an offering.
There's a single moment where Tam watches her mother's hands preparing an offering, and Nguon holds on that gesture long enough that we feel the three generations in the frame simultaneously—it's the kind of blocking choice that costs nothing but changes everything about what the film is asking us to understand.