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.

On paper, the numbers look alarming for Phnom Penh. On the ground, a different story is unfolding — one of a country rediscovering how to travel within its own borders.

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.