| The development and free-market economy projects Cambodia has embraced since the early 1990s have been impacting Cambodians' cultural and social lives. In this context of current cultural contestation between local values and globalized discourses, I examine three Cambodian melodramatic films -- as cultural products -- for their representation of gender and generational relations. These films have been produced with relatively low budgets and claimed by the filmmakers to be "realistic" and "moralistically educational," characteristic of filmmaking in present-day Cambodia. I have demonstrated that two of the films construct the asymmetrical relations between men and women in terms of economic and decision-making power in the spheres of family, social norms and expectations, and sexuality. The third affirms the current generation's parental values -- i.e. the values of the older, conservative generation -- by emphasizing the concept of gratitude, and contributes to the media process of constructing 'deviant' youth. |
