Swimming to Cambodia

This special limited edition J-card MediaBook slipcase (designed by Adam Maida) is limited to 3,000 units and is only available on our website and at select indie retailers. Absolutely no major retailers will be stocking them.

Taking its name from the Lumière Brothers invention of the same name, Cinématographe is a new sub-label from Vinegar Syndrome that seeks to fill gaps in the canon of American cinema. Offering a mix of auteur driven studio films produced during the New Hollywood era of the late 1960s and 70s all the way through the indie boom of the 1980s and 90s, Cinématographe will explore the wide breadth of American moviemaking, spanning numerous genres and scales of production. Curated and produced by Vinegar Syndrome's Justin LaLiberty, each limited edition release will be housed in a specially designed, cloth-bound, media book with embossed foil titles and custom molded disc trays accompanied by a slipcase featuring newly commissioned art and an individually numbered J-card.

Noted playwright, novelist and monologuist Spalding Gray spent eight weeks in Asia as an actor in Roland Joffé’s Academy Award Winning historical drama The Killing Fields, chronicling the history of the Khmer Rouge regime. In his famed one man show, Swimming to Cambodia, Gray laid bare his experiences on set and contextualizes his anecdotes with the stark history of the region. 

Directed for the screen by Jonathan Demme (Stop Making Sense), rendering Gray’s heartfelt, often very funny, monologue cinematic with the help of collaborators like cinematographer John Bailey (Mishima: A Life In Four Chapters), editor Carol Littleton (Beloved), and multidisciplinary artist Laurie Anderson, who is responsible for the film’s evocative score. Cinématographe is proud to bring one of the great performance films, and an oft-overlooked entry in Jonathan Demme’s career, to blu-ray for the first time in the world in a 2K new restoration from its original camera negative.

directed by: Jonathan Demme
starring: Spalding Gray
1987 / 85 min / 1.85:1 / English DTS-HD MA 2.0

Additional info:

• Region A Blu-ray
• New audio commentary with film critic Scout Tafoya
• Lifting Up the Carpet - a new video interview with Roland Joffé, director of The Killing Fields
• A Good Story is a Good Story - a new video interview with executive producer Ira Deutchman
• The Great Sensorium of the World - a new video interview with producer Edward Saxon
• Archival video interview with Jonathan Demme from 2013
• Two episodes of the Pure Nonfiction podcast: Jonathan Demme's Real Life Characters, recorded in 2016, featuring Demme discussing Swimming to Cambodia; and Jonathan Demme & Renée Shafransky on Spalding Gray, recorded in 2017
• New text essays by film critics Marya E. Gates, Chris Shields, Keith Uhlich and David M. Stewart, author of There's No Going Back: The Life and Work of Jonathan Demme
• English SDH subtitles