HBO airs story of Cambodian photographer who turned a blind eye to Khmer Rouge genocide

Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum/HBO

Wednesday, July 8th 2009
By David Hinckley
Daily News (New York, USA)

• THE CONSCIENCE OF NHEM EN
• Wednesday night at 8, HBO

It doesn't take long to explore the conscience of Nhem En.

He doesn't seem to have one.

This chilling documentary, which was nominated for an Oscar earlier this year, takes the viewer on a tour of the infamous 1975-1979 Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia. It's only a half-hour long, but feels as if it goes on for hours because the content is so grim, the sheer inhumanity so difficult to comprehend.

Filmmaker Steven Okazaki focuses on S-21, a high school that was converted into a prison that was really an execution chamber.

Over the four years of the Pol Pot regime, some 1.7 million Cambodians were slaughtered. At S-21, which today is open to the public as a memorial, 17,000 people were processed in. Eight survived.

Prisoners, who included everyone from infants to grandparents, were brought in and tortured until they confessed they were either CIA or KGB operatives - even though many did not know what the CIA or KGB were. They were then further tortured until they "named" at least one other person who was also a CIA or KGB operative.

Then they were executed.

Nhem En, who was 16, was the house photographer. As each prisoner was brought in, he took their picture - a classic mug shot, the prisoner staring into the camera. He estimates he photographed 6,000 prisoners, knowing that all were about to die.

"Conscience" includes other interviews, including two with survivors who recount the deprivation, torture and massacre of their families. One Khmer Rouge soldier is interviewed and says he knew nothing, did nothing, has nothing to say.

But Nhem En is the centerpiece. He is sorry people died, he says, but he had nothing to do with it, didn't even hear it, it happened in another room.

He's not sorry for his role, he says, because he did what was necessary to keep himself alive.

In fact, he says, "The world should thank me" for his work, because without his pictures, no one would remember these people.

It's a surreal moment. But Nhem En is facing, and sidestepping, the question that soldiers on the losing side have faced in almost every war back to the dawn of recorded history.

How could you do it, they are asked, and their replies are often some variation of the one here: Had I not done it, I would have been killed and they would have brought in someone else to do it.

Does the fact that Nhem En is right make his actions right?

"Conscience of Nhem En" starts off chilling and ends up haunting.

dhinckley@nydailynews.com

A photographer with no soul

Nhem En showing his photo album (Photo: AP)

Berkeley's Steven Okazaki was nominated for an Oscar. (Liz Hafalia / sfc)

Friday, February 13, 2009
Hugh Hart
Excerpt from the San Francisco Chronicle

On Tuesday, a U.N.-backed war crimes tribunal begins prosecuting five leaders of Cambodia's notorious Khmer Rouge regime. Better late than never, as far as Berkeley filmmaker Steven Okazaki is concerned. His Oscar-nominated short documentary, "The Conscience of Nhem En," takes viewers inside the walls of Tuol Sleng Prison. An estimated 17,000 Cambodian citizens entered the former school between 1975 and 1979. Eight lived to tell the tale. The rest were photographed, then executed.

"I've dug pretty deep into misery before, but 'The Conscience of Nhem En' is really the most difficult documentary I've ever made," Okazaki says.

He pitched HBO Documentary Films on the subject after reading about prison photographer Nhem En in 2007. When he was 16 years old, En took pictures of 6,000 prisoners shortly before their deaths.

"He came out of the woodwork because he thought he could make some money and wanted attention, I guess," Okazaki says.

Last year, Okazaki spent 2 1/2 weeks in Cambodia and questioned Nhem En on camera.

"I asked him numerous times, 'Did you ever just give these people a sympathetic look as if to say, "I'm sorry," and he said, 'Absolutely not. Why should I?' I found that disturbing. He appears to be a friendly, gentlemanly guy, but that's just on the surface. Underneath, he's a soulless, cold person."

Closely monitored by government security operatives, Okazaki managed to elicit frank accounts of incarceration from three survivors.

"Meeting these remarkable people became the great experience of making this film," Okazaki says. "They are all very emotionally scarred, but each of them has a certain spirit, and they were just lucky. One of the guys talks about being tortured for two weeks until someone came around asking, 'Does anyone know how to fix sewing machines?' He said, 'I do, I do!' That's how he got to live."

Okazaki is no stranger to bleak subject matter. He's made documentaries about teen drug addicts ("Black Tar Heroin"), Japanese American internment camps (the 1991 Oscar-winner "Days of Waiting") and nuclear devastation ("The Mushroom Club," nominated in 2006).

But "Conscience" took an unprecedented emotional toll during postproduction, he says.

"I'd blank out throughout the process of cutting the film and not know it; people would say to me, 'What happened? You just stopped talking for 10 seconds.' I found myself weeping at odd moments. I had diagnosable second-degree post-traumatic stress."

Next up for Okazaki: a documentary about Seattle street kids who have been thrown out of their homes by their parents. The filmmaker half jokes that he also hankers to make a movie with no redeeming social value whatsoever.

"I'm trying as hard as I can to do something totally irrelevant and stupid, so I've approached the producers of 'The Simpsons' about doing the life story of Homer Simpson."