AsiaLIFE

AsiaLIFE’s Kate Liana sits down with filmmaker Marc Eberle to discuss his touching documentary on the CIAs covert war in Laos.

Celluloid images of the open war in Vietnam have fixated Hollywood producers for decades, but little has been filmed about the ‘secret’ war in Laos that actually started five years previously. Researching ideas for a new project, filmmaker Marc Eberle travelled to Laos in 2002. He was struck by how much evidence there still was of the war.

"I saw the remnants of war everywhere, giant craters and scraps of metal from bombs," he says.

Despite being the biggest airborne bombing campaign in military history, the existence of the war in Laos was little known to anyone. Marc wanted to know how you go creating and maintaining a secret war, and what this meant for warfare in the future. It is this question that he pursues in his documentary The Most Secret Place on Earth (The CIA Covert War in Laos).

He was disappointed by the way other books and films on the subject had glorified the war, with little thought given to the Laotian people who had been the victims. The Hmong, an ethnic group close to the borders with Vietnam, were backed by the CIA to fight against the communist Lao and North Vietnamese forces. Abandoned by the Americans after the war and shunned by their own government, many are refugees. Some allegedly still live in remote jungle areas unaware that the war is over.

The war in Afghanistan started while Marc was shooting his documentary. He immediately saw the parallels between the two wars.

"I couldn't believe it, the tactics, the weapons, the political theory were the same,” he says. “Laos was the progenitor of war in the 21st century – outsourcing war to private companies, no accountability to congress or the public, to the press. I saw it all happening again and thought this was the time to tell this story."

His research brought him to Long Cheng, the secret military base that served as the CIA’s headquarters. It had been closed to the world since the CIA fled in 1975. Marc and his film crew were the first foreigners to gain access to it. This would serve as the emotional and symbolic core of the story, and the documentary is built around this base and its history.

A sobering and thorough account of the history and methodology that led to the atrocities, The Most Secret Place on Earth includes archive footage of bombing raids and decimated villages. It ends with a heartbreaking look at the refugees and the scarred landscape left behind by the Americans' actions. Perhaps of most interest though are the interviews with the many servicemen involved in the war, and their moral ambivalence towards the events.

Recently aired on German / French art channel ARTE, the documentary has been nominated for many awards on the international film festival circuit. It won an award for the best use of archival footage at the History Makers' Conference in New York City.

His latest project is a documentary on the post-Khmer Rouge generation growing up without any experience of the past that previous generations dealt with. He aims to show how this new generation will live their own lives. Heartened by the growing art scene, he celebrates the number of young artists who are starting to challenge the old models, and are questioning society. "Foreigners come here and tell all the negative stories,” he says. “I wanted to do a positive one.”

He is also working on a separate film about the Khmer Rouge tribunal that will focus on how modern Cambodian society is reconciling with the past and concepts of justice. "Every stone you turn over here, there's a story." The screening of The Most Secret Place will at least ensure that one stone is no longer left unturned.