A 23-year-old filmmaker has fallen to her death from a block of flats in mysterious circumstances.
Director and screenwriter Lai Yuqing plunged from the first floor at around 12:30am on 30 December.
She was rushed to hospital with severe head and bodily injuries caused by the impact. Last Friday (2 Jan), she died in hospital in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
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Lai, from Tianjin, China, moved to Cambodia in 2024 to work on short-form drama productions.
Her feature-length directorial debut, ‘Whisperings of the Moon’ – a queer romance set in Phnom Penh – premiered in the A Window On Asian Cinema section at the Busan International Film Festival in South Korea in 2025.
She once revealed in an interview: “When I first visited Phnom Penh, I experienced conflicting feelings because of the mixture of cultures – French, Chinese, Khmer, and English.
“The city gave me a sense of tragedy, which inspired me to set the story here.”
According to reports, the floor from which Lai fell was rented to Indian national Jatla Siddartha and Chinese national Li Fang.
Lai had previously collaborated with Siddartha professionally, as reported by Need To Know.
The building’s ground floor is occupied by the landlord, while the second floor is rented to a French national.
CCTV footage reportedly shows the French man returning home at 11:22pm on 29 December and finding Lai standing outside.
He is seen opening the gate for her and they both enter the building.
Shortly before the fall, CCTV recorded the sound of people talking inside.
Immediately afterwards, it shows Siddartha and Li went downstairs, found Lai and helped lift her.
Police confirmed that all three were together at the time of the fall.
Siddartha and Li were later taken to a police station to give statements, while officers recovered fingerprints from a railing at the scene.
Also an actress and musician, Lai studied film and art in New York, Los Angeles and Toronto.
She appeared in the 2024 short film ‘Notes of a Crocodile’, which was invited to the Toronto International Film Festival.
Friends of the filmmaker have said they do not believe she was suicidal.
