Film tracks Cambodian baseball

A poster for the film "Rice Field of Dreams," which will be shown in Long Beach on April 13

04/02/2011
By Greg Mellen, Staff Writer
Long Beach Press Telegram (California, USA)

LONG BEACH - Although filmmaker Daron Ker had only flickering memories of his homeland, he still felt a special kinship to Cambodia.

The flickering Ker best remembered were of films being shown on white bed sheets at the Thai refugee camp where he and his family lived before being relocated to California.

Those memories have endured and sustained Ker through the years as he grew up in the United States and earned a degree in film and television from the Academy of Art College in San Francisco.

When he finally got a chance to tell his first Cambodian tale on film, it was through the most American of pastimes - baseball.

The result is "Rice Field of Dreams," a documentary filmed in Cambodia and Thailand about the Cambodian national baseball team and the run-up to and through its first international competition in 2007 in Thailand.

The movie will premiere April 13 at the Art Theatre in Long Beach.

While there have been many films and documentaries based on the horrors of the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s and its sad and continuing hard aftermath, Ker wanted to tell a different story.

"My philosophy is forget about the past and focus on the future," said Ker, who directed and produced the film on a shoestring.

In 2005, Ker learned about the curious tale of Joeurt Puk, or Joe Cook as he is known, and his quixotic quest to bring baseball to Cambodia.

Himself a refugee and survivor of the Killing Fields era, which left upwards of 2 million Cambodians dead, Cook had an epiphany when he returned to his homeland for the first time. He would bring the sport he had grown to love to his country.

What started off as a feel-good story soon became clouded with suspicions of corruption, abuse of players, erratic behavior by Cook and other issues.

As Ker says in the film, "Life and Joe Cook have a way of complicating feel-good stories."

There is something about Cambodia, its people and its culture that can seem, if not star-crossed, at least, well, "complicated" from a Western perspective. And so it is with Cook.

In 2009, Patrick Hruby of "ESPN The Magazine" wrote a story with the headline "Field of Schemes?"

Early on Hruby writes, "Cook is my protagonist. And possibly my Kurtz."

You can guess where it goes from there.

In the wake of the media backlash, Cambodian baseball nearly unraveled, but Cook rebounded and after a hiatus, his team is back on the field in a new facility. The team hopes to play in the 2011 Southeast Asian Games, if it can up with the financing.

Ker says he plans to send proceeds from the movie to support the team in its quest to play in the SEA Games in November.

For his part, Ker thinks the ESPN story and others that followed were unfairly critical of Cook and may have relied too much on scandalous rumor.

"You're in a country where kids will say anything about you," Ker said. "Granted, (Cook's) not educated and he's got a big mouth, but you can't believe everything you hear."

Ker says his film is more about the game and the journey of the Cambodian national baseball team to the 2007 Southeast Asian Games.

"(The film) is 50 percent Western, 50 percent Cambodian. That's what makes it fascinating. It's a cross-cultural film," Ker says. "These kids are amazing. Their story is inspirational."

Ker made the film in his first trip back to his homeland, making the project his own journey as well as about that of the team.

The movie begins in 2007 as the team is preparing for the SEA Games and follows it through the competition.

As the team progresses, so does Cook's frustration, leading him to fire a team of Western coaches mid-tournament and take charge.

The film is then a curious blend of baseball and one man's obsession and where the two meet.

The Cambodian national team didn't win a game in that inaugural tournament, gave up 88 runs in five games and didn't get its first hit until the fourth game. However, it was competitive in its penultimate game, giving the team hope.

Two years later, in the eighth annual Asian Baseball Cup, Cambodia rallied to beat Malaysia 20-8 for its first international win.

For Ker, who has also done films about the Fryed Brothers biker rock band and the Doobie Brothers, "Rice Field" was a chance to connect with his homeland. He now hopes to do a full-length narrative film titled "Holiday In Cambodia," which he says will look at the issue of deportation.

As for the debut of "Rice Field," in Long Beach Ker says, "I just want to introduce myself to the community and hopefully they'll embrace me back."

greg.mellen@presstelegram.com, 562-499-1291