Asa teenager Lorn “Leak” Sreyleak looked forward to playing football every week with friends in his home town of Kampong Chhnang. But the 15-year-old couldn’t help but send another team that sometimes practiced on an adjacent pitch.
Led by a gruff coach affectionately called “Pa Vann”, or Dad, some of the players reminded Leak of himself: although he was born biologically female, Leak had known since childhood that he was a boy.
The other footballers “seemed happy”, recalls Leak, who is now 25 and lives in Phnom Penh. “They could do what they wanted to do. They had freedom.”
Within a few months, Leak had worked up the courage to join the team, known as the Lotus Sports Club, cut off his long hair and spoke to his family about his identity, a series of changes he credits to the team. “I saw there were other people like me,” he says.
Leak is one of dozens of teenagers across Cambodia to be drawn under the wing of transgender coach Van “Pa Vann” Sovann, whose under-21 football team has provided a bastion of acceptance in a place where queer people are often misunderstood or maligned. Queer kids from Phnom Penh and even more distant provinces such as Battambang and Svay Rieng have joined the team after hearing about it from friends or meeting Sovann at matches, often looking for support they can’t find at home.
Now the team, including Leak’s story, are chronicled in a new documentary, Lotus Sports Club, premiering on 29 June at the Cambodia International Film Festivaland made by a Cambodian and an Italian who met working on the set of the Angelina Jolie film First They Killed My Father.
The film follows 61-year-old Sovann, a former motodop or motorcycle taxi driver and teacher, who was born female but has identified as a man since growing up under the Pol Pot regime.
Cambodia’s attitudes to gender identity and sexuality are somewhat fluid: gender affirmation care is not widely available for trans Cambodians, and trans women in particular experience “high levels” of discrimination, according to a Cambodian Center for Human Rights report. Although the country has never criminalized same-sex relationships, gay marriage is illegal and Hun Sen, Cambodia’s long-serving prime minister, notoriously said he would disown his daughter for being gay.
In 2009 Sovann, who worked as a teacher with the local ministry of education, youth and sport, decided to form the football team.
From the start, the Lotus Sports Club attracted queer and straight players on the 22-person roster, a mix Sovann has tried to maintain over the years to encourage camaraderie. “I’ve always said that I wanted the kids to help each other,” he says.
But the coach doesn’t talk much about identity, instead teaching values such as discipline and teamwork to prepare the players for the outside world. As a queer person, “you’re being judged”, Sovann says. “Everything you do as a good citizen is so that people can see and value that you’re a good human being.”
Although the Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted its schedule, the Lotus Sports Club typically practices three times a week and travels the country in Sovann’s van to play against provincial under-21 women’s teams.
The team has faced discrimination. Opposing coaches have asked to see queer players’ genitals or pat them down, and sometimes spectators hurl insults from the sidelines. In one jarring scene in the documentary, Sovann stands up to a group of men: “I won’t accept people being rude to my team,” he says, jabbing his finger repeatedly in the air. “It’s unacceptable.”
The director, Vanna Hem, wanted to show those obstacles alongside the players’ deep friendships. Growing up in Kampong Chhnang, Hem, 38, knew Pa Vann as a part-time motodop who collected passengers at the market where Hem’s mother sold sweets. Pa Vann’s life partner was one of the sellers at the market. “I did n’t pay much attention to him,” recalls Hem, who identifies as LGBTQ+ and whose previous films covered human trafficking and sexual violence.
It wasn’t until 2013 that a friend mentioned Sovann’s team, and the film-maker was drawn back to his home town, making the two-hour bus journey from Phnom Penh weekly to tell the coach’s story. By 2015, Italian producer Tommaso Cologne had joined as co-director.
The documentary seeks to upend stereotypes of queer people experiencing only “discrimination and parents kicking them out and nobody wanting to be friends with them”, Hem says. “I wanted to show the negative things because I want something to change. But at the same time, there’s light in their lives also. These are not people born to suffer for ever.”
Current and former players say that the environment has improved since the team was first founded. Taem Thavy, a 20-year-old player who identifies as a man and left Phnom Penh in 2019 to join the team, has not experienced teasing or slurs.
Instead, Thavy has embraced baggier clothes and is considering cutting his long hair. “When I was in Phnom Penh, I wasn’t open about expressing [myself],” he says. “Now I don’t wear tight jeans like girls any more.”
For Kae “Amas” Timas, a 25-year-old trans man, leaving the Lotus Sports Club community was daunting, but after moving to Phnom Penh to sell sports equipment at a high-end mall, Amas has started to make more queer friends and experience the city’s nightlife.
He is too busy to call Sovann often, but he’d like to follow the coach’s example of owning a business and having a long-term partner. “If I had not been with the community and Pa Vann, I wouldn’t be able to stand up for myself,” he says.
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George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism