Prak Sunnara, director-general of the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts’ heritage department, confirmed Sunday that the statue was set to arrive last night at the Phnom Penh International Airport.

“The statue will arrive at 8:30 tonight and this statue was made in the 10th-century Koh Ker style,” he said. “It has been returned from the U.S.”

He declined to comment further, noting that an official press conference about the statue would be held at the Council of Ministers on Tuesday.

According to the Cleveland Museum of Art’s website, the 10th-century sandstone sculpture stands about 116 cm tall and 54 cm wide and depicts the god in a crouching position, with the body of a man and head of a monkey.

Anne Lemaistre, head of the U.N. cultural agency UNESCO in Cambodia, said it was clear the statue had originally been attached to a base, but it wasn’t until archaeologists unearthed previously undiscovered pedestals in the Koh Ker complex’s Prasat Chen temple last year that the statue’s exact location was determined.

“I think the proof has been established that it is coming from that place, because it was a matter of matching the pedestal with the sculpture,” Ms. Lemaistre said, referring to Prasat Chen.

“UNESCO is extremely satisfied and very grateful to the Cleveland museum for accepting to give it back,” she added.

Kong Vireak, director of the National Museum in Phnom Penh, said the statue would be handed over on Monday to the museum, where it will be displayed.

In May last year, Cleveland’s The Plain Dealer newspaper reported that Sonya Rhie Quintanilla, the Cleveland museum’s curator of Indian and Southeast Asian art, traveled to Cambodia several months earlier to attempt to determine whether the statue came from Prasat Chen.

“Our work on the piece and its provenance is still underway, and terribly time-consuming, but so far, based on my extensive fieldwork in Cambodia earlier this year, I can report that I did not find any physical evidence to confirm that the Cleveland Hanuman is from Prasat Chen,” the newspaper quoted Ms. Quintanilla as saying at the time.

Neither Ms. Quintanilla nor Caroline Guscott, the museum’s spokeswoman, immediately responded to requests for comment.

Ms. Lemaistre of UNESCO said that while she did not know what had motivated the museum to give back the statue, it would have been premature to ask for its return before the additional pedestals in the temple were discovered last year.

“I think we could not have really asked without having established the evidence,” she said.

Authors: Mech Dara and Chris Mueller | Source: The Cambodia Daily [May 11, 2015]

The ICC-Angkor has convened regularly twice a year to consistently follow up on all operations being carried out on the site, the statement said, adding that it is the international mechanism for coordinating all assistance extended by different countries and organizations for preserving and developing the site.

The session will be opened by Cambodian Deputy Prime Minister and Cabinet Minister Sok An and UNESCO Representative in Cambodia Anne Lemaistre.

The two-day session "will be devoted to a number of presentations by specialists, featuring themes on restoration, archaeological research, tourism and sustainable development," the statement said.

The ICC-Angkor was established after the Angkor Archeological Park was inscribed in the UNESCO's World Heritage list on December 14, 1992.

The ancient site is the country's most popular tourist destination, which is located in Siem Reap province, some 315 km northwest of Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia.

According to the latest government figures, the site attracted 842,719 foreign tourists in the first four months of this year, earning 24.1 million U.S. dollars from ticket sales.

Source: Xinhua [June 02, 2015]

Avelino `El Rico' Lescot

What happens when a stuntman, actor/director and screenwriter walk into a Gold Coast bar? They come up with the concept for an action fantasy film that is already raising eyebrows in Hollywood no joke. Rene Perrin, Avelino `El Rico' Lescot and Susan Macguillicuddy are the trio behind The Black Sun, which recently took out the Most Ambitious Screenplay award at the 2010 International Action on Film Festival in Los Angeles.

The locals are hoping the added hype surrounding their screenplay will push the project into production and attract the eye of distributors. Lescot, a Gold Coast-based actor, stuntman and filmmaker who has worked on The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Peter Pan and The Condemned, said The Black Sun incorporates several genres.

``It's enchanting and mystical,'' he said.
``It's a gypsy, action, adventure, romance, western with a strong supernatural feel that is set in the Pacific Islands, Mexico, China, New Zealand and here.
``At the moment the film industry needs something different but financially manageable and that's The Black Sun.''

The film follows a warrior's worldwide journey on the Matariki boat, which Lescot said is `like another star of the film'. Lescot and Perrin have an impressive international fanbase thanks to the success of their action film Among Dead Men. It won several awards for best fight choreography and generated considerable profits in DVD sales in Canada, Germany, Thailand, Cambodia, Poland, Puerto Rico, Hawaii and Hong Kong. It also grossed several times its $7000 budget in DVD sales through Walmart in the US. Perrin, who has worked as a stunt performer on films such as The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Daybreakers, Nim's Island, Fool's Gold and Ghost Ship, said they wanted to combine their `love of action with a love of romance' in The Black Sun.

Balancing out the testosterone on the team is screenwriter Susan Macguillicuddy. Despite having worked with the likes of Cate Blanchett, Jessica Alba, Antonio Banderas and Melanie Griffiths, Macguillicuddy said working with `the boys' on The Black Sun has been her `most cherished writing experience'.

``It's like we each started at one end of the canvas and worked our way to the middle, fine-tuning the parts of the script we liked,'' she said.
``It took us about a year and hundreds of meetings but we're happy with the finished product.
``We wanted to do something very avant garde with the genre and something new.
``Getting the Most Ambitious Screenplay award means we really pushed the genre, which is what we set out to do.''

International distributors have shown interest in The Black Sun and the trio is currently in the process of looking for investors.

P.S. Since it is less than two days until the release of Tomorrow, When The War Began I figure it’s time to start getting you all majorly excited. That is, if you aren’t already. Which you should be. Therefore, I’m officially declaring this as Tomorrow, When The War Began day and prepare yourself for a swag of related stories. Starting with the lovely Phoebe Tonkin (below), who plays Fi in the film.I interviewed her at the Queensland premiere last fortnight and the next day over breakfast in Southport. As well as talking about the movie and future projects, all the usual stuff, we broached the big one - Phoebe Tonkin’s favourite movies.

“I’ve always loved Pretty Woman, that’s probably my favourite. I saw Shutter Island recently which was really good. Princess Bride, oh and Girl Interrupted is also amazing. I love Julia Roberts so anything with her in it really.”

VIA Black Sun of a Gun

The dealer, Subhash Kapoor, is now awaiting trial in India for allegedly looting artifacts worth tens of millions of dollars.

Mr. Kapoor operated a now-defunct gallery on the Upper East Side called Art of the Past. Prosecutors allege that between 1995 and 2012 he illegally imported and sold stolen antiquities from India, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere, often using forged documents to pass the items off as legitimate.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations unit and the Manhattan district attorney’s office have together recovered more than 2,500 artifacts worth more than $100 million from the gallery and storage facilities in and around New York City.

Kenneth J. Kaplan, a lawyer in New York representing Mr. Kapoor, declined to comment Wednesday, but said his client had asserted his innocence both to him and to his counsel in India. Mr. Kapoor has not yet entered a plea in India, according to a spokeswoman for Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr.

The item recovered this week is a Chola-period bronze representing a Tamil poet and saint that dates to the 11th or 12th centuries, according to Brenton Easter, a special agent with Homeland Security Investigations. The statue, which stands nearly two feet tall and weighs more than 80 pounds, was allegedly looted about a decade ago from a temple in a village in the southeastern Indian state of Tamil Nadu.

The theft of the figure was “completely devastating” to the villagers, Mr. Easter said on Wednesday afternoon, as he stood by the open door of the van containing the relic parked on East 91st Street near Park Avenue. The item was smuggled into the U.S. labeled as a handicraft, and then offered for sale at Mr. Kapoor’s gallery on Madison Avenue.

In recent months some institutions that purchased objects from Mr. Kapoor have surrendered the items to Homeland Security Investigations. They include the Honolulu Museum of Art and the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts.

In a statement, Honolulu Museum Director Stephan Jost said in April that “clearly the museum could have done better” with its past vetting of objects. Dan L. Monroe, the Peabody Essex Museum director, said in a statement that month that the institution has undertaken “a rigorous internal assessment of its collection and is working in full cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security.”

This time around, the stolen object was voluntarily surrendered by an anonymous collector who had been contacted by investigators about the piece. Officials said the buyer was considered a victim because the statue was accompanied by a false provenance, or ownership history, that predated its theft.

“We commend this collector for his conscious decision to return this stolen idol,” said Raymond R. Parmer, Jr., special agent in charge of HSI New York. “We hope that other collectors, institutions and museums will continue to partner with HSI, and to see this surrender as a successful way to move forward when dealing with artifacts that might be of concern.”

The agency has recovered at least six other sacred Chola bronzes that it anticipates repatriating to the Indian government.

In April, the Manhattan district attorney’s office filed papers in New York State Supreme Court seeking the forfeiture of 2,622 items seized from the gallery and storage units in Manhattan, Queens and Long Island. The items were worth $107 million, according to the summons. Among them: a statue from India valued at $15 million, a large bronze statue from Cambodia or Thailand worth $5 million and a large standing Buddha from North India estimated at $7.5 million.

According to the April summons, Mr. Kapoor and his gallery manager, Aaron Freedman, “engaged in a common plan and scheme to illegally obtain and sell stolen items of art and conceal or disguise the nature, source and ownership of the illegally obtained property.”

Mr. Freedman pleaded guilty in December 2013 to five counts of criminal possession of stolen property and one count of conspiracy, according to the summons. Prosecutors said the antiquities were forfeitable from Mr. Kapoor and his gallery as proceeds and/or instrumentalities of crime.

Author: Jennifer Smith | Source: The Wall Street Journal [July 03, 2015]