Phnom Penh’s only elephant will be celebrated its birthday at Wat Phnom tomorrow, January 17 at 4pm. ‘Bring bananas, mangoes, apples and pears and, of course, birthday cakes! Sambo’s owner, Sin Sorn, is also happy for any small donation to cover medical and food costs’. According to Southeast Globe magazine, one of Cambodia’s finest magazines, Sambo the fame elephant ‘was born in the beginning of 1960 in Oral district, Kampong Speu province’. Sambo will turn 50 years old tomorrow.

Friends Center at Angkor Hospital for Children presents Cambodian Exhibition, a new photographic exhibition that takes place in Siem Reap from January to June 2010. More info can be located on the Internet at http://angkorhospital.org/.

This year’s PhotoPhnomPenh event will take place at Fine Arts University of Cambodia on November 28 – December 6, 2009. For more detail.

For the second PhotoPhnomPenh event, 22 exhibitions of international artists will be presented in the main cultural spaces of the city.In the spirit of discovery, festivity, and Asian-European encounters, PhnomPenhPhoto 2009 is offering 4 evenings of outdoor screenings in the courtyard of the beautiful Fine Arts University of Cambodia, followed by the dazzling “Night of the Year” in partnership with Les Rencontres d’Arles in France. A workshop will address the problematics of the publication of photographs and of their use in the press.

A photography exhibition (at Chinese House) by Cambodia-based photographer John Vink is happening in Phnom Penh until September the 6th, 2009. Link here. A comment made by an exhibition attendee can be found here.

An email from The LadyPenh team:

Subject: ladypenh.com launching

Message: Hello, we just launched our website about events in Phnom
Penh, http://ladypenh.com. We’d love to have your feedback!

Thanks in advance!

The LadyPenh team

About Lady Penh:

Lady Penh – this website – is all about events in Phnom Penh. We are a bunch of fellow PhnomPenhers with the feeling that our city is somewhat at crossroads: it’s getting kind of tough to keep track of what’s going on here – which had not been too hard until now (to say the least). Phnom Penh is awakening… And this website is our participation to this process. What to do in Phnom Penh: you can now ask Lady Penh, spread the word!!

Here we go, Cambodia is set to host Water Festival, The pirogue Racing Festival, or Bon Om Touk in Khmer, one of its biggest festivals early this November.

One of the largest festivals of Cambodia revolves around the Tonle Sap. The three-day Water festival of the reversal of the waters of the Great Lake is celebrated in October or November depending on when the waters reverse and flow back into the Mekong River. Boat races, the largest part of the festival, are held at the capital, Phnom Penh. Each village has the opportunity to join in the boat races and usually they do. The boats are usually dugout canoes with a prow and stern that curve upward. The boats are elaborately decorated and carved to represent the village. The prow is painted with a large eye like those that decorated the war vessels of ancient times.

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We are proud to introduce some of Roland Neveu’s remarkable photographs from his book ‘Cambodia: Years of Turmoil’. Please visit:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/angkorphotography
festival/sets/72157594330457623/

In May 1975, as Cambodia was being cut off from the outside world, the Khmer Rouge expelled the last remaining foreigners over the Thai border at Poipet. Among them was photographer Roland Neveu. At the time, he had no inkling of the genocide that would be inflicted on this country. But for the next 30 years, he regularly visited Cambodia and its borders, working
clandestinely at times, to document the horrors of war and the hopes for peace.

The pictures in this unique book bear witness to his enduring interest and coverage of the Cambodian story. Many photographs appeared in leading international newsmagazines, books and exhibitions. At the 2005 Angkor Photography Festival, 14 exhibits and 7 nights of slide show projections were organized. French photographer Roland Neveu began his career in the early 1970s after a stint at the University of Rennes, in Brittany. Quickly immersing himself in the
‘grand reportage’ arena, he became one of the few western photojournalists to witness the fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge in 1975. For almost two decades he travelled to hot spots around the world on assignment for leading international magazines like Time and Newsweek. Roland Neveu’s stories have ranged from documenting the first Soviet prisoners of war in
Afghanistan’s mudjahedeen holy war to Beirut’s siege in mid-1982. He also covered El Salvador’s bloody feud and the NPA guerilla struggle in the Philippines as well as producing the first images of AIDS in Uganda in 1986. His international reputation as a photo-journalist helped launch a career in the film industry where he worked as stills photographer with top Holly-wood directors including Oliver Stone, Brian de Palma and Ridley Scott. He work on Matt Dillon movie “City of Ghosts”, filmed in Cambodia. Continue Reading