The Sentry
Director: Jake Wachtel
Cambodia, Norway, United States, 2024, 18 min
Shooting Format:Digital
Festival Year:2025
Category:Narrative Short
Cast:Phang Dara, Daniel Raymont.
Crew:Writer: Jake Wachtel. Producers: Visal Sok, Jake Wachtel.
Email:wachtel.jake@gmail.com
Synopsis
A cheeky dismantling of spy tropes and a love letter to Cambodia, THE SENTRY follows a suave Western agent who thinks he's about to make another routine kill. But some stories refuse to be footnotes - and this particular guard isn't finished talking. A genre-bending tale about the extraordinary lives we're trained to overlook.
Trailer
About the director
American filmmaker Jake Wachtel is the director of KARMALINK, Cambodia’s first sci-fi film, which opened Venice Critics’ Week to critical acclaim. Variety praised it as “fresh and highly entertaining,” and it went on to win multiple international festival awards. Originally from Silicon Valley, Wachtel studied Psychology at Stanford before setting off to explore cultures beyond that privileged bubble. He began directing short documentaries for nonprofits in the Global South and moved to Cambodia in 2015 to teach filmmaking through Filmmakers Without Borders. Developed in Phnom Penh with a majority Cambodian cast and crew—including his former students—Karmalink marked the beginning of his genre-fluid storytelling. Now based in Cambodia, he is developing new projects that merge social consciousness with wildly entertaining genre explorations.
Filmmaker's note
In over half a century of James Bond films, our suave hero has eliminated enough henchmen, security guards, and various anonymous bad guys to populate a small town. Each one got maybe three seconds of screen time before becoming another statistic in the grand ledger of cinematic carnage.
I've lived in Cambodia for ten years, where every neighborhood has at least six different people who make the best prahok in the country, and where extraordinary things have a way of becoming ordinary. One day, the idea hit me like afternoon thunder in rainy season: what if we followed one of those guards?? What if he had some things to get off his chest before the credits rolled?
The thing about security guards working night shifts is they rarely do it because they dream of getting shot by British secret agents. Usually it's more mundane: a sick spouse, a child's education, or just trying to make rent in a world where the odds are stacked against you like motorbikes at a broken traffic light.
Speaking of odds—the West has a peculiar talent for turning millions of living, breathing humans into abstract concepts. "Developing world workers." "Emerging market labor force." Nice, clean phrases that help us forget these are actual people with actual stories, probably better stories than whatever's playing at the multiplex. And when we tell their stories, it's usually through the lens of some enlightened foreigner who swoops in to save the day—or maybe he's the one causing the trouble in the first place. The truth is messier: power, resources, damage, and redemption all tangled together like those electrical wires above the streets of Phnom Penh. These aren't stories of heroes and villains, but of human beings caught in systems bigger than themselves, each trying to do what they think is right—or at least necessary.
The Sentry is my attempt to smash together three genres—spy thriller, buddy comedy, and social drama—in hopes that something true might emerge from the wreckage. It's about seeing the people we're trained to ignore. It's about refusing to be a footnote in someone else's story. Because sometimes the best tales come from the people who weren't supposed to have speaking parts—especially when you can't get them to shut up.