Southeastern stories [Luang Prabang Film festival 2012]

Luang Prabang Film Festival unveils selection for third annual edition

September 4, 2012
Wise Kwai
The Nation

The Luang Prabang Film Festival is ready for its third edition this December with a line-up of movies from across Southeast Asia.

The titles are selected by the festival's Motion Picture Ambassadors (MPAs) with an aim to represent the best works produced in Southeast Asia within the past five years.

They will all be shown in nightly free open-air screenings in the central market plaza of the Unesco World Heritage city.

The festival will also feature short films, as well as exhibitions, seminars, workshops, concerts and performances.

Led by the chairman of its board of Directors, Lao-Australian actor Ananda Everingham, the festival will welcome many VIP guests and audiences from across the region and further abroad.

Thai films dominate the festival. Among the six titles offered by film critic Kong Rithdee is a mini-retrospective on the recent commercial features by Tanwarin Sukhapisit, the Isaan romance "Hak Na Sarakam" and the transgender drama "It Gets Better".

There's also Tom Waller's monastic mystery, "Mindfulness and Murder" and Wichanon Sumumjarn's debut feature "In April the Following Year, There Was a Fire".

The Thai line-up is rounded out with "The Cheer ambassadors", Luke Cassady-Dorion's rousing documentary of the underdog Thai squad that won the world cheerleading championships.

The Cambodian selection is heavy on documentaries, including "Duch, Master of Forges of Hell", about the warden of Phnom Penh's notorious Tuol Sleng torture facility under the Khmer Rouge, as well as "Enemies of the People", covering journalist Thet Sambath's decade-long odyssey to gain the trust of Khmer Rouge "Brother No 2", Nuon Chea. There's also "Who Killed Chea Vichea?", Bradley Cox's documentary on the death of a Cambodian labour leader. And "Golden Slumbers", Davy Chou's tribute to the lost films of the "golden age" of Cambodian cinema.

Silverdocs film festival addresses pollution in Cambodia

Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Excerpt from The Washington Post
POLLUTION

Troubled water, near and far

Silverdocs

The annual Silverdocs documentary film festival runs through June 27 in Silver Spring. This year's lineup of 102 films from 54 countries includes a few films with science themes, such as "Born Sweet," a heartbreaker about Vinh, a Cambodian boy with arsenic poisoning. In his rural village, tainted drinking water has given someone in almost every family arsenic poisoning, which causes black spots on the skin, coughing, diarrhea and vomiting. Vinh's father and grandfather are also afflicted. The boy dreams of becoming a karaoke star but grapples with what he sees as his destiny: "In this world, some people are salty, some people are sweet," he says in a voice-over. "The salty are strong, the sweet are sickly." This 28-minute film plays with a group of three other shorts Tuesday at noon at the AFI Silver Theatre and also on June 23. See http://www.silverdocs.com for ticket information.

Film on Cambodia sparks forgiveness

Thet Sambath, left, and Rob Lemkin talk about their movie after showing clip at Cambodian Christian Reform Church. (Scott G. Winterton, Deseret News)

Part of documentary on Khmer Rouge is shown at S.L. church

Sunday, Jan. 24, 2010
By Aaron Falk
Deseret News (Salt Lake City, Utah, USA)

SALT LAKE CITY — Thet Sambath lost his family to the Khmer Rouge but found peace in Cambodia's "killing fields," the site of mass executions in the 1970s.

Now the investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker hopes his personal search for closure can help lift the dark cloud that hangs over his country.

Sambath spent more than a decade making the film "Enemies of the People," a world cinema documentary competition entry at this year's Sundance Film Festival. The watershed work features some of the only recorded accounts from the Khmer Rouge soldiers and officials who committed the atrocities.

"Before I make the documentary, I don't know much," Sambath said Sunday at the Cambodian Christian Reform Church in Salt Lake City. "Now I know the reason. It's good that we have this information."

Sambath and co-director Rob Lemkin shared a clip of the film during the service.

In the video, a group of men point out across a field of green grass and palm trees. This is where we killed them, they say, and this is how we did it.

They recall the smell of blood on their hands and how they piled bodies into ditches.

"I came here only to show you the truth," one of them says.

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When the clip was over, Sambath took questions from the handful of Cambodians at the service. A few of the elders in the room spoke in Khmer as they shared their personal stories and feelings.

Sitha Troyer, of Salt Lake City, said Khmer Rouge soldiers in Cambodia shot her in the stomach. "I cried," she said after seeing the clip, "because I remember."

Charlie Phim, the church's pastor, recalled the brutal deaths of his family and his repeated efforts to escape the country.

But Sambath and Lemkin hope the soldiers' willingness to admit what happened will help Cambodians move on.

"It's an unspoken part of the history," Lemkin said. "It's a huge black hole."

In talking to Cambodians in Salt Lake City, the film already seems to be having that effect, Sambath said. "They forgive. They can forgive killers."

e-mail: afalk@desnews.com

Sundance Film Review: Enemies of the People

Nuon Chea (R) talking to Thet Sambath

01/23/10
By Dan Nailen
Salt Lake Magazine (Utah, USA)

Thet Sambath (pictured left) is a Cambodian newspaper journalist whose father was murdered by the Khmer Rouge in 1974, and whose mother was forced to marry a Khmer Rouge militiaman two years later.

For a decade, Sambath spent his free time journeying into the notorious "killing fields" of his home country to try and understand why so many of Cambodia's people were murdered. The result of that work is Enemies of the People, which Sambeth co-directed and produced with Rob Lemkin.

The film revolves around the relationship Sambath established with Nuon Chea, aka "Brother Number Two" (pictured below with Sambeth) and dictator Pol Pot's right-hand man. It took Sambeth years of gaining Chea's trust before he opened up and admitted that he and Pol Pot had plotted the killings as a means of defending their communist vision from "enemies of the people." Chea doesn't ever express remorse for the program he calls the "solution," but he does to Sambeth directly when the reporter tells the old man about his own family's relationship with the Khmer Rouge.

Sambath also tracks down several of the Khmer Rouge's foot soldiers, mostly peasants and farmers who were simply "following orders" when they slit the throats of their neighbors and buried them in mass graves. It's chilling to watch one of the men graphically illustrate how he would kill his victims, and it's intriguing to see how each of these murderers deals with what they've done all these years later.

Enemies of the People could prove to be an important historical document for decades to come. Sambeth kept his recorded conversations with Nuon Chea under lock and key for years, in fear they'd be confiscated and used as evidence in a trial. Indeed, the film ends with Nuon Chea's arrest by a joint force of the United Nations and Cambodia. He's charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes, as well as genocide, and his trial is slated, for now, for 2011.

Considering Sambeth has the first admittance by Brother Number Two of what he and Pol Pot instigated, it could be a quick trial.

Enemies of the People will screen:
Sunday, Jan. 24, at 9 p.m. at Park City's Holiday Village IV
Tuesday, Jan. 26 at 11:30 p.m. at Park City's Library Center Theatre
Wednesday, Jan. 27 at 9:45 p.m. at Salt Lake City's Broadway Cinemas
Friday, Jan. 29 at 6 p.m. at Park City's Egyptian Theatre

Visit the Sundance Film Festival Web site for a complete schedule and ticket information.

In ‘New Year Baby’ Bittersweet History

By Taing Sarada, VOA Khmer
Original report from Washington
20 May 2008

“New Year Baby” is a documentary movie highlighting the life of Poeuv Socheata’s parents under the Khmer Rouge. About 30 of her family members died during the rule of the regime.

The film was screened in Washington last week, and has been shown in many US states. Poeuv Socheata led and directed this documentary after she graduated from Smith College in Massachusetts in 2002.

The film demonstrated “the sadness and the bitter memory of Cambodia people who live without freedom and who live with silence,” said audience member Isaura Martinez. “Some of them were killed without pity.”

After seeing the movie Cambodian-Canadian Hen Bon Han called the Khmer Rouge “a regime of murder, sorrow and horror.”

A document filmmaker, Poeuv Socheata said she wanted to bring the show to Cambodia in coming years, and that it could act as “additional evidence” for the tribunal.

The movie was supported and sponsored by the Independence Television Service and Center for Asian American Media. Peuv Socheata spent three years making it.