Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam)

FILMS

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.

The Khmer Rouge Rice Fields:

The Story of Rape Survivor Tang Kim

Director/Producer ¨ Youk Chhang

A Film by Rachana Phat

2004

30 minutes

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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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Behind the Walls of S-21

Behind the Walls of S-21:
Oral Histories from Tuol Sleng Prison

Producer ¨ Youk Chhang

Director ¨ Doug Kass
2007
30 minutes

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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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Preparing for Justice

Directed by ¨ Pivoine Beang
                        Fatily Sa
                        Bunthy Chey

16.42 minutes

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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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Land

Water

Rain

Directed by Kalyanee Mam; Cinematographer: Ratanak Leng

Featured Length Documentary

For the last twenty years, the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam) has been at the forefront of efforts to gather stories of the surviving victims of the Cambodian genocide and to educate future generations on the events of this horrific period.

As Cambodia moves forward towards rapid development, the DC-Cam will have another unprecedented opportunity to document, through a film, the social and environmental impact of development in Cambodia. The film project aims to engage and inspire both a local and global dialogue on this subject as well as reveal the natural beauty of Cambodia’s people and landscape.

In LAND/WATER/RAIN, two ethnic Khmer communities, the Pnong, living in the forested hills of Mondul Kiri Province, whose livelihood depends on the land, and the Chams living on the river of Kampong Chhnang Province, whose livelihood is drawn from the water – struggle with the momentous challenges of daily survival in the face of development and change. Having lost their home and livelihood once to the Khmer Rouge, these communities must now cope with a second loss – the loss of an ability to make a living from the land and the river that are their homes.

Set in the context of a nation still struggling to reconcile its past, how individuals within these communities confront and resolve their losses is telling of how Cambodia will brave its own future.

Cambodia's story is not unique as the consequences of rapid development are being felt all over the world. But the tragic history of this nation, it's landscape saturated with vast green rice fields, glistening water and monsoon rains, and the people whose strength continues to endure despite difficult odds, makes for an exceptional, beautiful, and touching story.

Funding for this project was generously provided by the MACARTHUR foundation and with core support from The United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

Films on DK in France (in Khmer)

Films on DK in France (in English)

¡ List of Documentary Films Transferred to France