Last Night I Saw You Smiling: a poignant document of a utopian housing complex destroyed

Part wistful hymn, part visual poem, Neang Kavich’s loving tribute to the White Building, a legendary housing complex in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, searches for the soul that lies beneath the concrete. Built in 1963 by Cambodian architect Lu Ban Hap and Ukraine-born French engineer Vladimir Bodiansky, the apartment block bears witness to the ebb and flow of the country’s complex political history. Originally conceived as the modernist embodiment of an independent Cambodia, the White Building was erected alongside a series of cultural institutions that promoted a holistic relationship between urban dwellers and the arts. In 1975, this vision of urbanisation tragically fell apart when residents were forcibly removed from the compound after the Khmer Rouge came into power. Four years later, in 1979, surviving artists and cultural workers – including Kavich’s own parents – returned to the White Building where the complex gained a second lease of life as a robust cultural hub.

In this absorbing documentary, which Kavich himself recently developed into a parallel drama feature called White Building, the turbulence of regime changes is followed by forces of gentrification. On the cusp of demolition by a Japanese construction company, the White Building had its twilight in 2017, when nearly 500 families were forced to leave their homes. Despite the monetary compensation, the involuntary relocation stirred up painful memories of the Pol Pot regime. Again and again, the camera returns to the building’s corridors, where these conversations of doubts and nostalgia took place. Flooded with light, the hallways were the arteries of the White Building, pulsating with the sounds of music, vivacious chatter, and the comings and goings of the residents. As the demolition deadline inched nearer, these recurring shots of the corridors ache with a piercing melancholy. The hallways went eerily quiet, with footsteps replaced by heaps of rubble; it was as if the blood had drained from the building.

What makes Kavich’s documentary portrait particularly affecting is this ability to map out the emotional history that runs parallel to the fading plasters of the White Building. Prior to their eviction, the residents mentioned the sizes of their homes and their moving dates to authority figures; such logistical details pale in comparison to the weight of the personal and collective history held by each square metre in the White Building. Turning the camera on his parents, Kavich captures how his father patiently wiped the dust off the jackets of his books until nearly 40 years of life were neatly packed up in boxes. As the older man totters around an empty apartment, unable to articulate his thoughts about seeing his family home in this barren state, it’s particularly heartbreaking to see him appear to lose his way without the anchor of familial objects. At one point, Kavich’s father searches for one of his sculptures, only to find it wrapped in a black nylon bag. Stripped of personal touches, the space suddenly transforms into a distant artefact, a soulless cultural monument.

Considering that Kavich grew up in the White Building, the location begins to feel like the film’s spiritual birthplace; there is therefore a bittersweet irony in the documentary existing to record the building’s death. A sense of loss pervades every frame, enhanced by the residents’ sentimental penchant for retro tunes, which mingle with the cacophonous sounds of residents packing up their belongings. Most of these songs were released in the years preceding the 1975 fall of Phnom Penh, including Khmer versions of mid-century Western pop hits – music whose circulation became impossible under the Khmer Rouge. Floating through the rooms of the White Building, these melodies were subsumed by the concrete structure; just as the greying walls of the White Building clash with the surrounding skyscrapers, these songs also epitomise a bygone era and sensibility that have all but vanished.

While elegiac in tone, Last Night I Saw You Smiling suggests that cinema can in some ways stand against death. In the film’s haunting final shots, the camera observes a corridor that is being knocked down, before turning away. An erratic panning movement takes us rapidly through a succession of open doorways to empty apartments, as if the camera cannot bear to look at the carnage. One can even hear a faint cough from Kavich while the debris from the demolition envelops the frame. Yet the film keeps rolling. Under the unfeeling tentacles of relentless machines, the White Building might have crumbled into dust, but its spirit will live on in Kavich’s vivid images.

► Last Night I Saw You Smiling is available to stream on True Story now.