An untrained actor with two real parts to his name, both set in the Khmer Rouge years, Phoeung Kompheak plays men who know more than they say. What he has is stillness and an unforced sincerity. What he does not yet have is a filmography.
Fi1m perspective
Pa, in First They Killed My Father (2017), has decided to lie to keep his family alive, and Phoeung Kompheak plays the deciding rather than the lie. He speaks softly, he keeps his eyes on whoever is asking, and he lets us see that he hates every word. He is on screen far less than Sareum Srey Moch, whose Loung the film follows almost without a break, and yet in the family scenes we found ourselves watching him anyway. Loung's face stays shut by design; Pa's is trying to stay shut and not quite managing, and that is where the film's grief gets through to us.
He came to acting sideways and late. He trained in French literature in Phnom Penh and then in France, worked as a translator, including at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, taught French, and ran the Kok Thlok Artists Association, which keeps traditional Khmer theatre alive. A friend put his name forward and he found himself, with no training at all, playing Duch, the interrogator who later ran S-21, in Régis Wargnier's The Gate (2014). He had translated for the real man at the tribunal. It is hard to think of a stranger preparation for a screen debut, or a better one.
We have not reviewed The Gate, so we will say only what was widely noticed: that he gave Duch an intelligence to go with the cruelty, and that the film around him was found more cerebral than felt. That fits what we saw in Pa. Both are men holding something back, and Kompheak is good at the holding. He has said he knows none of the rules of acting and simply plays with honest feeling, and in Angelina Jolie's film that is exactly what is wanted. A trained actor might have made more of Pa, and the film would have been worse for it.
Two parts in a decade, and some small roles in shorts since, is not a body of work, and he seems to know it. His teaching, his translating and his theatre come first, and he told the Phnom Penh Post in 2014, "If I play, it must be a good film." So far the cinema has offered him two. A director with a quiet man to cast, and the patience to let him be quiet, could do a great deal worse.
Biography
Phoeung Kompheak is a Cambodian actor. He played Pa Ung in the 2017 film First They Killed My Father, directed by Angelina Jolie, and Douch in the 2014 film The Gate.
Born in 1976 in Sisophon, Banteay Meanchey province, Kompheak studied French literature at the Royal University of Phnom Penh, completing a master’s degree, and later pursued doctoral studies in France. He works as an interpreter at the Cambodian Senate and as a French teacher, and directs the Kok Thlok Artists Association.
