Age 15+, YA Sci-Fi
13-year-old Leng Heng wakes up each day to dreams of his past life, or are they memories? Making a discovery he can’t ignore, Leng recruits his friends to help him find a long lost buried treasure. A young orphan girl and accomplished con artist, Srey Leak, comes to the boys’ rescue and masterminds their bold adventures. Set in a dystopian near-future Phnom Penh, where, youth use “nanobugs” as augmented reality and a digital map to see into their dreams, the plot and the world of Karmalink takes wild twists and turns. What begins as a playful quest soon leads to deeper intrigue as the young teenagers intersect with Dr. Sophia, a neuroscientist studying memory loss. Traveling through levels of reality and states of being, full of adventures centuries-old and futuristic, spiritual and high-tech, this Buddhist sci-fi mystery received instant acclaim when the film opened the Venice Film Critics’ Week in 2021.
Director Biography
Jake Wachtel grew up in Palo Alto, California and graduated from Stanford University with degrees in Psychology and Film Studies. His decision in 2015 to move to Cambodia to teach filmmaking to children led to his short film “The Foreigner Here” (2015). Karmalink (2021) is his debut feature.