While documentary films were shot in Cambodia by foreign cinematographers as early as the 1920s, indigenous filmmaking did not begin until the 1950s, when pioneering silent movies were made by several young filmmakers who had studied film overseas, notably Roeum Sophon, Ieu Pannakar and Sun Bun Ly. The film training workshops organised by the United States Information Service (USIS) and the equipment provided by the US for film making seem to have been quite influential during this period. One of the first films made by Cambodians to be screened widely comprised footage of hill tribes (Dan Prean Lbas Prich, ‘Footprints of the Hunter’) shot by off-duty military personnel using American equipment.

During the 1960s movie tickets were relatively affordable, although the audience for various types of movie seems to have been divided along social lines. European films were extremely popular with students and educated white-collar workers, while the audience for locally-produced Cambodian movies is retrospectively described as ‘farmers and labourers of the working class’.

During the unrest of the early 1970s, refugees crowded the cities and provided eager audiences for films; thus, despite the encroaching war, film production continued and movie-going remained extremely popular. It was only in late 1974 and early 1975 that movie house owners began to close their establishments when the public became too scared to venture out for entertainment.

After the end of the Khmer Rouge era in 1979, movie houses in Phnom Penh were re-opened almost immediately. However, there was no domestic film industry left, since many of the filmmakers and actors from the 1960s and 1970s had been killed or had fled the country. Negatives and prints of many films were destroyed, stolen, or missing. Money and equipment for making films were non-existent. Lacking any kind of existing domestic film product, the new government showed films from Việt Nam, the Soviet Union, the Socialist Bloc of Eastern Europe, and occasionally from India. Hungry for entertainment of any kind, moviegoers flocked to the theatres, even though most of the films consisted of clichéd socialist propaganda fables or romantic dramas about lovers struggling against class boundaries.