Germans invade Cambodia

I encountered a film crew shooting some footage near the Capitol guesthouse in Phnom Penh recently and thought little more of it, until I heard on the grapevine that it was for a new German movie currently being shot in Cambodia. The story Same Same But Different is the on-screen romance between author Benjamin Prufer and Cambodian prostitute Srey Keo. They fall in love and marry, knowing that Srey Keo was HIV+ and Prufer wrote a book about it. That book is being turned into a movie and stars young German actor David Kross, who has been making Hollywood headlines as a male lead opposite Kate Winslett in The Reader, one of a slew of Nazi films hitting the big screen in recent times. Find out more about the shooting of the film Same Same But Different here. However that's not the only film that has seen German film crews running around Cambodia. Recently, Hanuman Films acted as the local experts for a drama-documentary being shot mostly around Angkor about the life of Adolf Bastian, a little-known German anthropologist who was one of the earliest European visitors to Angkor in the 1860s and who documented his visit in great detail. A book about his travels was published by White Lotus in 2005.