These videos are of Polin, a young Cambodian woman, cooking various meals. No recipes are offered, just shots of her gathering some ingredients and preparing the food. This is a style you see in a certain genre of cooking videos -- no dialog and an emphasis on traditional living with pretty scenery mixed in.
A while back I posted Cooking snake soup, which was a video of two Cambodian sisters in the same style (I think one of them was Polin). In the comments to that post I mentioned some of these Vlogs had gotten in trouble for cooking endangered animals. Polin is connected to these dodgier Vlogs. From a Coconuts Bangkok article:
Our first-hand introduction to the world of primitive tech videos took place on an enormous resin plantation, about two-and-a-half hours outside Phnom Penh.
The set was in the back of an expansive, well-kept property just meters from the shore of the Mekong. There we found a house fashioned from wooden rods with a thatched roof. Inside, it was completely empty – a prop.
There was a small pond and a pen for the ducks, but both were empty as the ducks were being kept at the couple’s real home. Three fighting cocks sat in wooden cages — though it was unclear if they were destined to be part of a production.
Huong Raty, the producer of NLTV, was wearing pressed slacks and a Lacoste shirt when he came out to greet us. The 31-year-old had a gold ring, a nice watch, and carefully styled hair. His wife, Touch Polin, in contrast, arrived wearing traditional Cambodian clothes, her outfit for that day’s shoot.
The video they were shooting during our visit, Cooking Cassava with Coconut Milk in My Village would be uploaded the next day, not to NLTV but to another channel they produce, one called Polin Lifestyle (PL) channel.
The production set-up was simple but professional. Shot on a tripod with an SLR, they worked with the efficiency of a crew that clearly produced these videos on a near-daily basis.
Polin slowly and deliberately cut and stripped a cassava root while being given instructions by her husband off-screen. When the camera stopped filming, she retired to the shade of the house while two men came to the table to quickly slice up what was left.
The full video, which shows Polin arriving on a riverbank in a boat, digging up the cassava roots, then later cooking them with coconut milk, follows the basic tenets of other primitive technology-type videos. There’s no talking, no background music, a lot of long shots, and plenty of repetitive action. There is a calming effect to watching it, much in contrast to the frenzied eating seen in the videos produced by PTKH and similar channels.
Not all of their videos are as innocuous, however. The top videos on their main channel, NLTV, mostly focus on Polin, sometimes accompanied by other women, cooking and eating large game (the videos that allegedly featured protected animals have been deleted from their channel).
Unmentioned in the above article, to me the videos at the Polin Lifestyle YouTube channel are closer to the Chinese Vlogger Li ZiQi (my post about her is Homemade wheat beer and crayfish)
Below are a couple more Polin's videos, with no endangered species in either. In the first she makes a white radish curry and a fish stew, in the second she goes to a beekeeper and gets some honey, which she uses to make a honey glazed grilled chicken.
No comments:
Post a Comment