Cinema documentary:Cambodia's Lotus Sports Club and Pa Vann Sovann, transgender coach

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Cinema documentary:Cambodia's Lotus Sports Club and Pa Vann Sovann, transgender coach

Post by CEOCambodiaNews »

Discipline, teamwork, acceptance: why football is a lifeline for queer Cambodian teens
A new documentary tells the story of the Lotus Sports Club and Pa Vann Sovann, its much-respected transgender coach
Image
Van ‘Pa Vann’ Sovann and players in the team bus. Photograph: Courtesy of Document Our History Now
Fiona Kelliher
Mon 27 Jun 2022 11.00 BST

As a teenager Lorn “Leak” Sreyleak looked forward to playing football every week with friends in his home town of Kampong Chhnang. But the 15-year-old couldn’t help but envy another team that sometimes practised on an adjacent pitch.

Led by a gruff coach affectionately called “Pa Vann”, or Dad, some of the players reminded Leak of himself: although he was born biologically female, Leak had known since childhood that he was a boy.

The other footballers “seemed happy”, recalls Leak, who is now 25 and lives in Phnom Penh. “They could do what they wanted to do. They had freedom.”

Within a few months, Leak had worked up the courage to join the team, known as the Lotus Sports Club, cut off his long hair and spoken to his family about his identity, a series of changes he credits to the team. “I saw there were other people like me,” he says.

Leak is one of dozens of teenagers across Cambodia to be drawn under the wing of transgender coach Van “Pa Vann” Sovann, whose under-21 football team has provided a bastion of acceptance in a place where queer people are often misunderstood or maligned. Queer kids from Phnom Penh and even more distant provinces such as Battambang and Svay Rieng have joined the team after hearing about it from friends or meeting Sovann at matches, often looking for support they can’t find at home.

Now the team, including Leak’s story, are chronicled in a new documentary, Lotus Sports Club, premiering on 29 June at the Cambodia International film festival, and made by a Cambodian and an Italian who met working on the set of the Angelina Jolie film First They Killed My Father.

The film follows 61-year-old Sovann, a former motodop or motorcycle taxi driver and teacher, who was born female but has identified as a man since growing up under the Pol Pot regime.
Full article: https://www.theguardian.com/global-deve ... dian-teens
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Re: Cinema documentary:Cambodia's Lotus Sports Club and Pa Vann Sovann, transgender coach

Post by CEOCambodiaNews »


Lotus Sports Club
Netherlands & Cambodia, 2022

A documentary about identity, family, growing up in Cambodia, and, last but not least, football.

We are happy and proud to announce that, after more than 7 years in the making, the documentary Lotus Sports Club, directed by Vanna Hem and Tommaso Colognese, and produced by Robert Witlox and Document Our History Now in association with RoCK (Rainbow Community Kampuchea), is world premiering at the 11th Cambodia International Film Festival.

There will be 2 screenings:

Wednesday, June 29th at 4:15pm at the Chaktomuk Conference Hall in Phnom Penh
Saturday, July 2nd at 4:30pm at Rosewood Phnom Penh.


We can’t wait to share this work of passion and love with all of our supporters who have believed in us during all these years.
We are so grateful for your precious support; we couldn’t have made it without you!

Thank you so much!

Arkoun​ Chraen!

អរគុណ​ច្រើន!

For more information and the full line up of the festival please check CIFF’s Facebook page: www.facebook.com/cambodiaiff/

https://documentourhistorynow.org/all-s ... port-club/
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Re: Cinema documentary:Cambodia's Lotus Sports Club and Pa Vann Sovann, transgender coach

Post by CEOCambodiaNews »

To celebrate Human Rights Day:

Launch of "Lotus Sports Club" Documentary Screening
AKP Phnom Penh, December 09, 2022--
Image
H.E. Khieu Kanharith (Pic. 1), Minister of Information, and H.E. Keo Remy (Pic. 2), Delegate Minister Attached to the Prime Minister, President of Cambodian Human Rights Committee, address the participants while they were presiding over the launch of "Lotus Sports Club" documentary on the occasion of Human Rights Day, organised by the Rainbow Community Kampuchea in cooperation with Document Our History Now (DOHN), at Chenla Theater in Phnom Penh this afternoon.
Image
Photos: Khem Sovannara
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Re: Cinema documentary:Cambodia's Lotus Sports Club and Pa Vann Sovann, transgender coach

Post by Anchor Moy »

Came across this and I knew I'd seen it before somewhere (like here, lol):

Lotus Sports Club – Queer East Film Festival 2023
Reviewer: Richard Maguire
Photo of The Reviews Hub - FilmThe Reviews Hub - FilmApril 23, 2023, 2 minutes read
Lotus Sports Club (Cambodia) (Queer East 2023)
Directors: Vanna Hem and Tommaso Colognese
Image
This understated documentary from Cambodia tells the story of Leak, a trans man, finding solace in a women’s football team run by another trans man, Pa Vann. However, the term ‘trans man’ might be too much of a Western identity to describe Leak and Pa Vann. They have forged their own selves, unrestricted by labels.

When Leak was a teenager, he went to live with Pa Vann in Kampong Chhnang in rural Cambodia. Leak’s family thought that Pa Vann’s influence and nurturing skills might help Leak through adolescence. Now Leak sees Pa Vann as a father figure and a teacher. Pa Vann doesn’t just coach the under-21s women’s football team but he also teaches the players how to make furniture, truly setting up his protégés for later life.

Leak is not the only queer player on Pa Vann’s team. There are a few other trans men and some lesbians too. With his short hair and boyish looks, Leak is sometimes asked his gender by match officials. Despite identifying as a man, Leak also has to identify as a woman if he wants to play football. Leak’s identity is fluid and strategic. Pa Vann is proud of the diversity in his team and lets any player who needs his assistance come and live in his home. With a variety of domestic animals running around, Pa Vann’s house is chaotic but it affords a loving and supportive base for his players.

Vanna Hem and Tommaso Colognese’s 70-minute documentary sometimes loses focus; we spend just as much time with Leak as we do Pa Vann, but their previous lives are only sketched out for us. For instance, we never discover where Pa Vann gets his money from to buy the minibuses that take the teams to the games or to build the pitch outside his home. This is a snapshot of time rather than a biographical look at two people. However, as the football team begins to prepare for the National Games in Phnom Penh the film finally has a trajectory.

Filmed over a period of five years, both Leak and Pa Vann are very relaxed talking to the invisible camera. And by the end of the film, now living in the capital, Leak discusses his plans for the future, wishing he had enough money to pay for ‘top surgery’. Much of his confidence comes from the loving home that Pa Vann provided but most of this is unsaid and, when they meet up again, there are no tearful embraces or gushing speeches. This lack of sentimentality gives Lotus Sports Club a solid sense of realness helped, too, by the bleached-out colour tone that Hem and Colognese choose.

But despite this eschewal of easy sentiment, the filmmakers do come up with a happy ending. It takes place at a Pride event where there are lots of Westerners in attendance. This kaleidoscope of cultures and glitter could easily be its own subject for a film, but for Pa Vann and Leak, especially, it signals hope for the future.
https://www.thereviewshub.com/lotus-spo ... ival-2023/
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