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

"The Conscience of Nhem En" On HBO: A Review

Nhem En (Photo: AP)

July 7, 2009
By Elyssa Spitzer
Huffington Post

The Conscience of Nhem En, premiering tonight on HBO at 8:00, tells the story of the havoc - both psychological and physical - that the Khmer Rouge's reign wrecked on the Cambodian people. 1.7 million people died in a supposed effort to seek out CIA and KGB agents within Cambodia from 1975-79. "Very few people were actually guilty," said the documentary's eponymous Nhem En, a photographer who at age 16 took roughly 6,000 photos of prisoners before each headed to a near-certain death. "But each person had to give a name and that person said another name." And in the absurdity of the Khmer Rouge, all those named died.

The story is an important one to tell. Relative to other such human travesties, the Khmer Rouge is not often discussed, (at least in the world I have experienced). Perhaps the silence is the result of an innate sense of guilt Americans feel hearing the tale. The United States was not uninvolved in Pol Pot's rise to power - a point the film drives home within the first half-minute with the subtitles, "During the Vietnam War, the United States carried out massive, covert bombing of Cambodia, contributing to the rise of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge." But whatever the reason the story is not discussed, The Conscience of Nhem En is a certain step to clarity, and in that sense it is worth watching.

The premise of the film is powerful because the reality of the Khmer Rouge is horrifying. Do not watch it if the aim is to see something uplifting that makes you think positively about humanity. This documentary shows the worst of our species, our unfathomable ability to do harm to our own. Skulls are shown, stored in containers en mass. Eerily uniform headshots show thousands of Cambodians headed to their near-certain death. And perhaps most terrifying is the interview with Nhem En in which he unapologetically defends his taking of photos rather than trying to save his muses: "Well, it's human nature... People do what they have to do to survive."

The film seems grey, almost hollow; only in the very beginning and end does music lighten the heavy footage. There are extended moments of silence that leave time for reflection, and the silence is quite uncomfortable. But the discomfort is, I assume, intentional. Watching former prisoners walk through the halls of the Tuol Sleng Prison should not be an undisturbed experience.

The narrative is not told as an emotional one but rather as a straight history; if anything, it is too cold. Men and women list off the family members they lost to Pol Pot. One man lost his parents and all six of his siblings. Another woman lost nine children. No one was untouched. But as they list off the depletion of their families for the camera, none cry. It has become a fact of life for them, and their matter-of-factness when listing off their losses is disconcerting, unnerving. However, to the film's credit, the abysmal is coupled with human resilience. The documentary concerns itself with the past, but it is deeply rooted in the present and the emotional carryover that results from the Khmer Rouge.

Did I enjoy watching The Conscience of Nhem En? No. But I am glad I saw it.

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."