A Cambodian family's long path to reconciliation

Yan Chheing, center, in 1998. (Thierry Farlise)

Monday, March 5, 2007
By Seth Mydans
The International Herald Tribune (France)

"Imagine their excitement if they saw the water I knew everywhere when I was young — the water was clear like glass. But they don't know any better. They have seen only their small pond and they are happy with that." - Yan Chhieng, talking about life in the Site-2 refugee camp in Thailand

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PHNOM PENH: Stanley Harper took 18 years to complete his documentary film about a divided Cambodian family because, he says, "that's how long it took." Beginning in a refugee camp on the border with Thailand, he followed the family's story with delicate minimalism as it reunited, reconciled and recovered the treasure of a hard life in the rice fields of Cambodia.

It took so long because, Harper said, stories unfold at their own pace, because he was forced again and again to stop and search for funds, and because he simply would not let go.

"Oh, it's Stanley and his film that will never end," people would say when he came around once again, showing new footage to potential backers.

The result is "Cambodian Dreams," something of a parable of the country's struggle for reconciliation and normalcy since the time of the Khmer Rouge killing fields, when 1.7 million people died between 1975 and 1979.

Harper said that the Cambodian government had agreed to launch the film and simulcast it on all national television channels, but that he was submitting it first for consideration for inclusion at the Cannes Film Festival this spring.

At its heart is the determination and eloquence of the family's matriarch, Yan Chheing, a woman who embodies the uncomplicated certainties of village life that give strength in times of upheaval.

"What so struck me was her longing for homeland and her craving for dignity and self-sufficiency," Harper said, "and this she achieves in the film."

Surrounded by the passivity of other refugees, Yan Chhieng has a sense of place and belonging that seems to have sustained Harper, a New Zealand native who has lived in Europe and Asia for decades and said that he did not know himself what to call home.

"I am afraid my grandchildren will never learn anything," Yan Chhieng says. "They will be satisfied with just living in here, happy to be surrounded by a fence. And why shouldn't they be happy? They were born here, they grew up knowing only this miserable place. They just roam around in here, that's all they know. If we stay here it will be like they are adrift on a river."

To stay with a project so long may be "beyond anything that seems normal to the outside world," said Philip Jones Griffiths, one of the great photographers of the Indochina war, who advised Harper on the editing of the film.

"We all have a choice in life," said Griffiths, whose own work in Cambodia goes back 40 years. "You can cover a hell of a lot wide and shallow or you can cover a small number of things narrow and deep. Both are valid. But those who decide to do narrow and deep produce something that ultimately lasts."

The film opens in the Site-2 refugee camp, a fenced-in world of hundreds of thousands of people just inside the border of Thailand, where Yan Chheing's grandchildren are growing up without ever seeing a field or a forest, eating rationed rice and drinking water delivered by truck.

"Water I wouldn't wash my feet in makes them happy," the grandmother says as children splash in a muddy hole that passes for their swimming pool. "Imagine their excitement if they saw the water I knew everywhere when I was young — the water was clear like glass. But they don't know any better. They have seen only their small pond and they are happy with that."

Without telling her, Harper and his crew also began to film the parallel story of her grown daughter, Tha, on the other side of the border, living the traditional life that Yan Chheing longs for.

Tha speaks with resentment of what she sees as the easy life of the refugees. She, too, is unaware of Harper's parallel work on the other side of the border.

While it glides over the beauty of the countryside, the tactful camera work of Andrew Speller and others seems almost to hold its breath as the characters speak.

"They ran away for their own well-being and happiness," Tha says of her mother and the others. "They eat and sleep well, no worries at all. They thought only about their own welfare and left the difficulties to those staying in Cambodia. I don't want them back."

Halfway into the film, after becoming intimate with both sides of the family, Harper said, he sat down with Yan Chheing in the refugee camp and said, "Now, grandma, tell me about Tha." He said the matriarch immediately understood what Harper had done, and wrote a letter to her daughter saying the refugees would soon be allowed to return home and asking, "Do you ever miss me?"

"Do you ever think about me?" she asks. "I want to live near you. Will you allow me to live near you?"

The scene in which Tha's husband slowly reads the letter to her, as she sketches patterns in a straw mat with her finger, is the core of the film. It releases her feelings for her mother and, based on forgiveness, begins their reconciliation.

When finally Yan Chheing's family is headed home in the back of a pickup truck, her grandchildren, freed from their barbed wire world, are amazed at the fields and trees they are seeing for the first time.

"What's that animal?" a grandson asks, looking at the staple of Cambodian rice fields, a water buffalo. "Do they eat chicks?"

Tha looks up as the refugees arrive.

"Oh, mother," she says, and the two women embrace.

The film was almost done but once again Harper ran out of money. This time it was six years before he could visit the family again.

What he found when he returned seemed to undermine his years of work. The family was still there in the village, still going through the annual cycle of farming; nothing seemed to have changed.

"I went back to my hotel room and I felt quite empty and disappointed and sad," he said. "I thought these people would have made more progress.

"And then as I was lying on my bed — I'll never forget — it hit me," he said. "I had just seen a miracle and I hadn't recognized it. The miracle was that these two families were still together, living and working together. And that's called reconciliation. That's what it's all about. They're still together."