The Hemakcheat was once one of Cambodia’s most beloved cinemas and Meas Sopheap one of its star dancers. Today it is a notorious slum, and Meas one of hundreds who shelter there.

In early summer, as the rainy season approaches Phnom Penh, the faintest wind shakes Meas Sopheap’s home – a creaky shelter in the once-grand building. Water seeps through the roof, fashioned from plastic sheets and corrugated iron, into a mound of sodden rubbish underfoot. At 87, her body bears the scars of an untreated skin disease and she scratches herself constantly as she tells her story.

A few decades ago Meas Sopheap was a star, and the Hemakcheat was one of the country’s most beloved cinemas.

“I was beautiful at that time, maybe you want to see,” she says, searching through a plastic binder for two old photographs – relics that pre-date the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, which seized power in 1975 and banned personal property. “Before the Pol Pot regime arrived, there were many people in the city and we were very happy,” she continues, referring as many Cambodians do to the Khmer Rouge era by the name of its leader.

The years between 1960 and 1975 are sometimes referred to as the country’s cultural golden age. Hundreds of Cambodian films were produced: tales of royalty and magic including several amateurish effortsby the charismatic King Norodom Sihanouk. New Khmer architecture, Asia’s answer to Bauhaus, was born. The Hemakcheat, a brutalist-style building that could seat 1,000-plus theatregoers, was a prime example.

Today the cinema is a notorious slum, one of more than 300 in the capital. Hundreds of men, women and children shelter here, many on the ground-floor auditorium where they are shrouded in permanent darkness among hundreds of bats that screech and flap their wings constantly. Children play on rickety staircases. Dirty water drips from the ceiling and soaks into a towering, stinking mound of rubbish. More waste falls from makeshift floors constructed above. The rotten stench of sewage is overpowering.