News  ·  04 | 08 | 2021

Young Love

Lomorpich Rithy | Open Doors: Screenings

A girl who desperately wants to experience her first kiss is the main character of Young Love, a romantic comedy from Cambodia selected as the first movie of the Open Doors selection to be shown to the Locarno Film Festival audience.

The director Lomorpich Rithy, working on a screenplay which proves to be witty and well balanced in mixing tones, composes an endearing human mosaic capable of portraying the psychology and the emotional inner life of a group of schoolmates.

Within a mainstream genre like the teen comedy, Young Love achieves the goal of showing a true yet funny portrait of contemporary Cambodian youth. In more than one scene, the movie successfully develops a coming-of-age story that talks about the importance of someone’s dreams as much as it values connections like true friendship. Rithy clearly has in mind classics like John Hughes’ Breakfast Club and Claude Pinoteau’s La Boum, and uses their influence in order to build something original and refreshing.

A movie that proves how Open Doors is  this year more than ever  a selection which looks at the cinematic South and East discovering new talents and endorsing their personal touch and creativity.

Adriano Ercolani

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