This year’s Angkor Photo Festival, which runs from November 23-30, will have a new base and for the first time in the festival’s history the Festival Centre and Workshop Centre will be housed in the same location.

The festival’s Asia coordinator Jessica Lim said, “We'll be hosted by The Loft in the heart of downtown Siem Reap. In the previous years, due to space constraints, we have had to have the Festival Centre separate from where the Angkor Photo Workshops were happening.

“This year we'll have everyone together under one roof, which makes for a lot more dynamic interactions between our festival visitors, photographers, and workshops participants. Plus a whole lot more fun.”

Guest curators this year are Bangladeshi photographer, writer and activist Shahidul Alam, and French photo-journalist François Leroy.

Award-winning Alam has exhibited widely, and set up the Chobi Mela photography festival in Dhaka. Leroy is director of Visa pour l’Image, a long-running international photojournalism festival held in Perpignan, France since 1989.

Lim said, “It will be a magical mix to have the two of them together. They will each have an evening of slideshow during the festival in which they present a showcase of work selected by them.”

The festival’s exhibitions are still being firmed up, but Lim says there will once again be an emphasis on public and outdoor exhibits, as well as bigger photos then in previous years, resulting in a lot of ‘larger-than-life' installations.

Lim said, “One exhibit which I'm looking forward to is by New York-based photographer Brian Sokol – The Most Important Thing – in which he photographed refugees with the single most valuable item they brought along with them as they fled their homes, and asked them what the significance of that one item was.”