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DC-Cam has supported several filmmakers with photographs and
music, research, translation, logistics support, and interviews
with its staff. For example, in 2004, we provided research,
translation, and other support to Cambodian director
Rithy Panh on his
documentary S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, which
was screened at the Cannes Film Festival. In April, DC-Cam
director Youk Chhang accompanied Mr. Panh to New York to screen
the film at the United Nations in preface to fundraising for the
tribunal. We also gave advisory support to Mr. Panh two other
documentary films.
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One night, newly married
Tang Kim was told by the Khmer Rouge that she was being taken to
live with her soldier husband. But instead, she and eight other
women were sent to a rice field near her village for execution.
Huddled on a dike with only one soldier to guard her, Tang Kim
heard the screams of the other women being raped. Knowing she
would be next, Tang Kim begged her guard for protection. But the
other soldiers returned and raped her as well.
This documentary relates the story of Tang Kim (who is a
Buddhist nun today) and her constant struggles to come to terms
with what happened to her during the Khmer Rouge regime.
It has been screened in
Thailand, the Brussels Film Festival, the Prix Bruno Mersch Film
Festival, and the Museum of Modern Art and Asian Cultural
Council in
New York. It was also nominated as a finalist at the 2005 US
ASEAN Film, Video and Photography Festival. Earnings from DVD
productions of the film are being used to support the education
of Taing Kim’s children.
Copies of this film are available at the Documentation Center of
Cambodia’s Public Information Room (66A
Sihanouk Blvd.,
Phnom Penh, 023-211-875, Monday through Friday,
8:00 a.m. to 5 p.m.).
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After
five years of waging civil war, Cambodian communist forces known
as the Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975.
They immediately began forcibly evacuating the residents of the
capital and other cities, displacing more than two million
people to the countryside.
The city
dwellers joined rural Cambodians in an ill-fated attempt to turn
the country back to “year zero” and establish a peasant-led
agrarian society. Most of the population was forced to work 14
or more hours a day, building dikes and canals, and growing rice
and other crops.
The
Khmer Rouge also abolished schools, money, private property,
courts of law, markets, businesses, the practice of religion,
and nearly all personal freedoms.
Over the
next nearly four years, as many as one of every four Cambodians
died from
malnutrition, hard labor, or disease. At least another 200,000
were executed without trial.
Vietnamese troops and the forces of the United Front for the
National Salvation of
Kampuchea invaded Cambodia on Christmas Day 1978. Encountering
only a fleeing Khmer Rouge military and a weakened population,
they moved quickly through the country and reached Phnom Penh on
January 7, 1979. By late afternoon they occupied the city, which
was empty save for a few hundred prisoners of war and people in
hiding waiting to escape.
The next
day, two Vietnamese officials who accompanied the invasion were
drawn to the stench from a compound in the southern part of the
city. There, they discovered the most important of the Khmer
Rouge prisons, the former Tuol Sleng High School, which was
known to the Khmer Rouge by the code name S-21.
Tuol
Sleng was used to detain people the Khmer Rouge considered to be
enemies of the state, including members of their own ranks. Of
the estimated 14,000 men, women, and children held there, only
about a dozen are known to have survived.
Two men
who were imprisoned at Tuol Sleng, Bou Meng and Chum Mei, and a
former guard, Him Huy, were interviewed for this film in 2006,
more than 25 years after the tragedy of Democratic Kampuchea.
Funding for this project was generously provided by the Soros
Foundation’s Open Society Institute under its Documents and
Confronting the Past Affinity Group Project Support for DC-Cam's
operations is provided by the US Agency for International
Development (USAID) and Swedish International Development Agency
(Sida)_______________________
S-21
Survivors today are: 1) Vann Nath aka Heng Nath, 2) Chum Mei, 3)
Bou Meng, 4) Nhem Sal,
5) Touch Tem.
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From 1975 to 1979, the Khmer Rouge regime was responsible for the deaths of
approximately 1.7 million Cambodians, in one of the most brutal genocides of the 20th
Century.
After falling from power in 1979, the Khmer Rouge waged a civil war from the Thai
border for nearly 20 years. But by the late 1990’s, the regime was in a state of collapse,
and the Royal Government of Cambodia began working with the United Nations to
create a court to try senior Khmer Rouge leaders. An international tribunal was finally
established in Phnom Penh under the official name: the Extraordinary Chambers in the
Courts of Cambodia for the Prosecution of Crimes Committed during the Period of
Democratic Kampuchea.
In 2006, the Documentation Center of Cambodia began a series of tours of the
Extraordinary Chambers Court, to educate Cambodians about the workings of the
Tribunal, and to help them participate in the justice process. The tours also brought
participants to key Khmer Rouge sites so they could witness for themselves the actions
of the regime. (See the tour report)
The tours sought people from across Cambodian society, including Buddhist Nuns,
Cham Muslims, students, and those living in poor areas with little access to information.
For it is the thinking, that the court will be most effective, if the Cambodian people
themselves are involved in the process.
Funding
for this project was generously provided by Royal Danish
Embassy, with core support from The United States Agency for
International Development (USAID) and Swedish International
Development Agency (SIDA)
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