AsiaLIFE

A personal journey to uncover the horrors of the Khmer Rouge becomes a powerful, landmark documentary in Enemies of the People. Nora Lindstrom talks to filmmakers Thet Sambath and Rob Lemkin.

AL: Enemies of the People is the culmination of years of hard work and gaining the confidence of former Khmer Rouge cadre. How do you feel now that it is done?

TS: I feel very happy. When I got all this done I felt like we are all lucky to have these interviews from Khmer Rouge cadre and especially from Nuon Chea, Brother Number Two. If we had gone to trial without these interviews we would have missed all this information... I feel happy and lucky for all people.

AL: Did completing the film and releasing it to the public bring you closure?

TS: Yes, it did. Everything that I have done is for the new generation and for the Cambodian people. When the people get more information good things between people can happen. Like reconciliation, people learn not to take revenge and instead people will find out how to resolve the problem. That is my dream for the future.

But at the beginning when I started investigating I just wanted to know what was behind the killing of so many people. The Khmer Rouge leaders, especially the top leaders, always refute that they killed the people. The Cambodian people are unhappy with the answers from the top Khmer Rouge. But because we get confessions from them, people can get peace.  

AL: The film features unprecedented confessions by former Khmer Rouge cadre, especially Nuon Chea. How did you manage to get them to talk?

TS: It was hard, I tried for many years. It was a step-by-step process. I’ve know some of these people for five or 10 years. 

I knew that these people had experience with the Khmer Rouge, that they killed people. But they had never confessed, because they felt embarrassed and uncomfortable. But I knew about these people and that’s why I tried to get close to them. When we get close to each other and trust each other, then everything will come out, the truth will come out. So I got everything.

AL: How did you get people to talk?

TS: The reason I got this [material] is because I worked hard and I spent a lot of my own money.

People asked me if I got funds from any organisation or NGO. At first, I didn’t understand their question. Later they told me. “Because you spend your own money it means that you are a real researcher, you want to know the truth,” they said.

RL: In the film Sambath says many times “I am not from the court, tell me the truth.” For years people have been coming to the Khmer Rouge, from Pol Pot all the way down to the killers from the countryside, to say “I accuse you, I have evidence you did this”. And [the killers] immediately react to that by saying “I don’t know anything about it, I did nothing”.

Sambath’s approach to the whole thing is completely different. His approach is very, very, careful, even respectful. Surprisingly respectful toward people who many in the world would regard as not worthy of any kind of respect.  He does not come in any spirit of accusation. He comes in the spirit of trying to say, “I know what you were involved with was very great and terrible. Tell me what you know and tell what you did.”

That is such a different attitude from the ECCC, which is a criminal justice procedure that simply seeks to get guilty verdicts. That is why that kind of process is extremely limited by comparison to the kind of work that Sambath is doing.

My personal view is that the ECCC will do nothing towards socially reconstructing the country and that what Sambath is doing represents something far more inspiring and positive.

AL: Was the potential of Sambath’s material immediately obvious to you?

RL: Sambath had started to film interviews with Nuon Chea and some other people who are in the film about one or two months before we met back in September 2006 when I came to do a film about the Khmer Rouge trial.

Initially Sambath was working for me as a fixer, but over the coming months we joined forces. For a while I was still trying to do a film about the trial, but then I became less interested in that. Then I realised Sambath had a relationship with Nuon Chea, and he told me about his relationship with people in the countryside, and I thought that was more interesting.

So it wasn’t an immediate thing, it was gradual.

After about seven or eight months from when we started filming, not with Nuon Chea but with the killers in the countryside, that’s when I realised we had a film. Because although the interviews with Nuon Chea are the ones that are newsworthy, the heart of the film really is the relationship with the ordinary people who were involved in this chain of killing.

AL: The documentary has met with a lot of success, including winning the Special Jury Prize at Sundance and the Grand Jury Award at the Full Frame Documentary Festival. Did you expect so much international publicity and acclaim?

RL: To be honest, no. When we started right at the beginning, it looked like it was just going to be a half an hour programme for British TV which would have been finished a long time ago. And maybe even forgotten about a long time ago too.

Gradually, it became possible to widen the scope of the film so that it had a more profound content. The universal aspect of the story, of good and evil, of repentance, of the horror of mass killings, and the idea of a victim coming to see the people who destroyed his world as a child, and coming in a genuinely open and almost tolerant sprit in the interest of getting a deeper story, a deeper truth out of it all, that has got a wider theme. It’s not just about Cambodia and I think that’s why the film–in pretty much every country–has been so well received and won prizes.

AL: The documentary’s screening in Cambodia took place just before Duch’s verdict was anticipated. Was this your plan?

RL: Yes. It was intentional to have it around this time. The court has tried to subpoena the film as evidence in the case against Nuon Chea. We’ve resisted that and have come under some criticism from the court for that because I don’t think they have appreciated the nature of proper journalism. When you have a relationship with someone who is giving you some very vital information, you get that information from the person on a certain basis. You can’t then turn around to a court process and hand over that information to them.

They’ve accused us of letting the Khmer Rouge walk free. Our line would be that if you have 2 million dollars, which is 1.99 million more than we have, you can do your work and get your own information. It’s not our problem if you can’t convict these people

[The court] is not interested in reconciliation. They’re not interested in seeing this society go forward in any kind of way.

We’re showing it here now partly also because it is opening next week in America, and we wanted to release it here before anywhere else because this is the most important place.

We originally wanted to show it earlier but the government refused us permission. Ideally we would have showed it in a big cinema with thousands of Cambodians coming to see it, but we didn’t get permission to do that.

In the future we would like to show the film around the Cambodian countryside. In the film even the guys who did the killings want the film to be shown all around Cambodia.

AL: What do you hope audiences, especially Khmer viewers, will take away from the film?

TS: I think that after they see the film they will get some knowledge and some people can understand and they can feel better from the confession. Because for many years it has been hard to get confessions, especially from Khmer Rouge leaders and the people who did the killings. I’m waiting for their reactions.