James Speck built a career out of being early to new mediums. Now, a month into a residency at Knai Bang Chatt, he's writing a piece of music that puts the Mississippi and the Mekong in the same room.

From a refugee camp on the Thai border to the sets of John Wick and The Expendables, Nop Daren's story reads like a script he could have stunted himself. This French-born performer of Cambodian descent, trained in the shadow of some of the biggest names in the business, now carries the colours of Cambodia into some of the most spectacular productions in the world of action cinema.

Since 6 July, Belgian photographer Aurélie Fischer has been staying at Knai Bang Chatt, in Kep, for a one-month residency organised by Art for Kep. Through the monsoon season, she explores the connections between landscape, labour and identity.

For four weeks this summer, Studio Images – Maison de la Photographie opens its walls to sixteen graduating photographers. Shaped by two years of training, their personal series look at Cambodia from the inside — memory, identity, and the quiet texture of everyday life.

How a Phnom Penh actress found herself, speaking both Khmer and Mandarin, in the credits of a short film selected at one of the most respected festivals in Chinese independent cinema.

How an interpreter from Siem Reap, who became the guide and friend of American journalist Sydney Schanberg, survived four years of hell under the Khmer Rouge before forging, out of the silence of his own survival, the phrase that would forever name one of the twentieth century's greatest crimes.

For nearly six decades, he was the quietest and most powerful name in the Asian art trade. Douglas Latchford — self-taught collector, published scholar, a familiar face in Phnom Penh's diplomatic circles — was, for his Western clients, the ultimate guarantee of legitimacy when it came to acquiring a Khmer sculpture. Prestigious museums, New York auction houses, wealthy private collectors: they all trusted him. They were wrong.

In Ratanakiri and Mondulkiri, two northeastern provinces where indigenous communities remain the majority, one in two teenage girls still consider it “normal” for a girl to marry before turning 18. A study published in March 2026 by UNICEF Cambodia and the Behavioural Insights Team dissects, village by village, the intimate drivers of a practice that Cambodian authorities are working to roll back.

On 3 July, at Bien Public in Bordeaux, a venue came alive to the rhythm of breaking and a Khmer DJ set for the launch of Hip Hope Community for Cambodia. It was only the opening move: on 8 July, the momentum carries on to Paris with the Tiny Jam. The shared goal, driven by the Bordeaux-based association Le Grand Crew, is to use dance to build a lasting bridge between the French hip-hop scene and two Cambodian organisations working on the ground, Tiny Toones and the Rombak Bat

Battambang, late 1960s. Chantha Nguon is a pampered child in a comfortable family, the kind where meals are plentiful and the future feels like a given. Her father is Khmer, her mother half-Vietnamese — a detail that means nothing yet. It soon will, and it will matter enormously.

At the Hills Tribes Memory Community Center in Mondulkiri, under the auspices of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, a 22-year-old intern is spending her summer helping revive an endangered textile craft: Cham silk. The account of Mok Chantreapheak, a Business Administration and Management student in Budapest, sheds light on a project where commerce and collective memory intersect.

Prum Chit is 79 years old. He lives in Ba-noy village, Angkanh commune, Prey Kabbas district, Takeo province. Before the Khmer Rouge, he was a farmer. Afterward, he remained a farmer. But between the two, there were four years during which his cousins, his brother-in-law, his uncle, and the head monk of the local pagoda all vanished — taken in the night by the Angkar, for reasons no one ever explained to him.

The Bronx, Boston, the studios of Los Angeles: the quiet career of a Cambodian-American actress in the American film industry.

Montier-en-Der, Haute-Marne. Winter, 1862. A country priest sits in his presbytery reading dispatches arriving from Paris: a certain Henri Mouhot, a naturalist dead in Laos, whose posthumously published journals have set the capital ablaze.

In residence in Kep since June 20, photographer, filmmaker and fashion designer Shanghai Chang is shaping a conceptual fashion piece out of debris gathered along the coast. Portrait of a Phnom Penh-born artist who has made indiscipline his method.

French gunboats steam up the Tonlé Sap and drop anchor facing the royal palace. Their guns do not fire. They do not need to. Inside the palace, Cochinchina's governor Charles Thomson hands King Norodom I a document to sign: a convention transferring control of the kingdom's internal affairs to the French.

Born around 1930 in Prey Veng Province, Chum Mey was an ordinary mechanic before the war made him one of the very few men to survive S-21, the most notorious torture center of the Khmer Rouge regime.

Phnom Penh will host the 20th Francophonie Summit this November, with more than 90 delegations expected, flags and protocol speeches guaranteed. A powerful symbol for a country whose late King Norodom Sihanouk was one of the organisation's founding figures back in 1970.

He vanished in 1974 in northern Cambodia while trying to interview the Khmer Rouge. Marc Filloux, a young AFP reporter, was only 29. Fifty years later, Jean-François Bouvet retraces his fate in an investigative book, "L'homme qui voulait rencontrer les Khmers rouges" ("The Man Who Wanted to Meet the Khmer Rouge"), published by Éditions L'Harmattan.

Le BA-BA du KHMER ORAL," by Fabien Peyronnet, positions itself as a serious alternative to standard tourist phrasebooks

Born in 1958, the eldest child of a Cambodian farming family, Hang Nget was sixteen years old when the Khmer Rouge seized power in April 1975. Over four years, she lost her father, four brothers, and nearly everything that had constituted her life. Her testimony, collected in 2010 by TPO Cambodia and preserved in the DC-Cam archives in Phnom Penh, stands as one of the most shattering documents in the memory of the Cambodian genocide.

From the Basque Country to Senegal, the Philippines and now Cambodia, Clara Neumann found far more than a detour in Kep — a rhythm, a breath of fresh air, and perhaps a reason to stay a little longer.

He entered the Cambodian forest with two elephants, an interpreter, and theories about rubber. Eight days later, he stumbled out without a shirt or shoes, gaunt and dishevelled, utterly spent — having walked two hundred kilometres without food.

Published by Éditions Naima in March 2026, "Cambodge, l'art devant l'extrême" is far more than an academic essay. It is an intimate and rigorous journey through fifty years of creation in the face of the unthinkable.