MuseumDESCRIPTION:
Socheata Poeuv is an independent film maker and the founder of Khmer Legacies. She talks about her documentary New Year Baby, which follows her journey to Cambodia where she uncovers the history of her family’s struggles during the Khmer Rouge regime.
TRANSCRIPT:
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Welcome to this week’s episode of Voices on Genocide Prevention. With me today is Socheata Poeuv, who is an independent film maker and the founder of Khmer Legacies. Socheata, thank you for joining me.
SOCHEATA POEUV: Thank you for having me.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Socheata’s film, which is called New Year Baby, tells the story, her own personal story and I wondered if you could introduce what the film’s about for our audience.
SOCHEATA POEUV: Sure. New Year Baby is a personal documentary about my own family’s experience of having survived the Cambodian genocide. I was born and grew up after my parents had endured this period of history, had basically escaped Cambodia and ended up in the refugee camps in Thailand, where I was actually born. I grew up not knowing very much about this part of history and also about my own family’s experience of having survived. The film is really an investigation into what really happened. There are some startling secrets that become revealed through the course of the film that bear more insight, not only into my own family’s story, but I think what Cambodia has been going through for the past 30 years or so dealing with the legacy of this genocide.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And you say there are secrets and the reason there are secrets is, as a point that you make very eloquently in the film, is that there’s a generation who has not spoken about their experiences for the most part. Why do you think there were these decades of silence?
SOCHEATA POEUV: It’s not an uncommon story of survivors who have suffered through very traumatic things not wanting to relive and revisit those memories. In addition to the very personal reasons why people don’t talk, I think there’s also a political reason in the idea that many Cambodians even those here who are in the safety of America and are American citizens feel certain political pressures to not revisit this story. There’s a lot of politicization of the idea of memory when it comes to Cambodia. There are many layers and many reasons to-- that support the silence.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And for you and the next generation, particularly, and I think maybe we should talk a little bit later about the difference between those who grew up in Cambodia and those who grew up in refugee families like yourself who left the country, what are some of the costs of that silence?
SOCHEATA POEUV: Well, now you have a new generation of Cambodians and Cambodian Americans who are my age, who really don’t understand where they came from and what their family legacy is. Therefore I would say have somewhat of an incoherent narrative about who they are and what their own life is about. It’s something that has created a big cultural divide between my generation and the previous generation. It’s something that I think can only be bridged through discovering this identity and a discovery process of one’s personal story.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And as you prepared for it, you say in the film that you didn’t know that much about the Khmer Rouge Regime, the period which they were in power when you began this journey. You certainly know a lot now. What were the components of that history that most surprised or shocked you?
SOCHEATA POEUV: I was most shocked by the level of control that the Khmer Rouge regime exerted on its people. It’s something that I could only compare to an Orwellian Society, like 1984. Even to the level of eliminating certain Cambodian words from the vocabulary that the Khmer Rouge deemed to be corrupt or frivolous or for whatever reason. When I found out that the Khmer Rouge would social engineer families by forcing people of different groups to get married. That was very shocking to me. That seemed to me to be such an intrusion on one’s personal life and privacy. I’ve heard anecdotes of the Khmer Rouge forcing female members of the royal family in Cambodia to marry handicapped Khmer Rouge cadre as way to punish them and humiliate them. For me to uncover these kinds of details of the mechanisms of the Khmer Rouge was really shocking.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: That is something that does come across very strongly in the historical materials and then there’s some stunning animations that I found really effective in the film trying of help your audience understand what the Khmer Rouge was. But I think it’s most powerful in contrast with the incredible tenderness with which your family members treat each other and humor and humanity of those relationships. That contrast I think is one of the most jarring in the film.
Did your parents welcome the idea of creating a film about this trip back to Cambodia?
SOCHEATA POEUV: Well, when I first started on this whole process, I really didn’t know what I was doing and so this process is really nothing more than a glorified home video.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: It is a little more than that…
SOCHEATA POEUV: But when I started that’s really what it was. I didn’t know what-- if I was going to make a film afterwards. I truly just wanted to have this opportunity to capture and to document my family’s story by going back to some of the places where they had experienced these things. When I started, everything was fine because this is just a home video that I was making. As I continued through the process and I began to see that it may really be a film here and I continued to pursue to get funding in order to finish it and to find a broadcaster. Eventually I had to tell my parents, “Yeah well this little project that I started was going to be nationally televised on PBS.” That was a little bit shocking to them. But it took me three years to make this film so they did have some time to get used to the idea. By the time that they had the chance to see the full film with an audience in a real theater, it just seemed like the maturation of this whole process.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: What was their response to that first screening with an audience?
SOCHEATA POEUV: It was amazing because they had seen the film previous to that, in our living room and they responded very emotionally, very powerfully to that and that was great. But it was at a whole different level when they had the chance to see the film with an audience. After the film ended the lights came up and the audience stood up and gave them a standing ovation and invited my whole family to come to the front of the theater to have their moment.
It was, I have to say, the first time in their entire lives where they had been so honored for who they are and for their story. To go from being ashamed and afraid, really, to tell one’s story to then be honored by it by the public was just a huge transformation for them. It was just a huge affirmation of their life and of the choices they had made that brought them here. So it was wholly gratifying for me to see and I think for them as well.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: There’s also an extreme gap between those who are able to leave Cambodia and those who stayed and you see that a few moments as your parents visit with family that they haven’t seen in quite some time. I just want -- how do you struggle with that being, you know, the “Rich Americans” and I put that in quotation marks, having some privileges but also feeling like you’re on this search not having-- having that gap in your identity structure.
SOCHEATA POEUV: Sure well, it became very clear to me and I think clear to my parents as well even though they still consider themselves very much Cambodian that they had changed so much. We-- and there is a huge cultural gap and cultural difference between us because of our experience of having lived in America. There’s really no denying that at any level. I really got to see how American I truly am when I went to Cambodia. Not only because of the relative privilege that I enjoy but just the cultural attitudes are still really different. It was interesting at that level to go back to one’s ancestral homelands and the word “home” is in that phrase, and yet to find that you’re still very alien in this homeland.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And you had also mentioned that you didn’t know that much about Cambodia and you weren’t quite certain and the project started really as this home video. I have to say the quality of it is far beyond any home video I would imagine. But were there other places or other legacies of dealing with mass atrocity or genocide but that helped inspire you or that helped served as a model for your work?
SOCHEATA POEUV: Well, after I made New Year Baby I became inspired by the model of the Shoah Foundation, which is of course the organization that Steven Spielberg started after he made Schindler’s List that has since recorded 52,000 testimonies of Holocaust survivors around the world. I felt like I wanted this opportunity to be available to Cambodians as well. That actually the process of telling one’s story of passing it on from one generation to the next is one that fits into the cultural mechanisms and tools of Cambodia because it is such an orally based culture. There is so much emphasis on oral transfer of knowledge and stories.
I felt like a project like this could help to address three distinct areas. The first one is to help open the door for healing for survivors by being able to tell their story sometimes for the first time. The second aspect is by bridging the cultural divide that we’ve talked about between the young generation and the old generation. In many cases we have members of the younger generation interviewing the older members of the community. The third aspect is to use these stories in a powerful way and transform them really into educational tools to further awareness and education about what happened in Cambodia. But also to add these voices to the collective voices of the survivor community that is standing in testimony and standing in solidarity for victims of genocide that are ongoing.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And you mentioned many times in the film that there hasn’t really been a reckoning or an accounting in the sense of bringing people to justice until very, very recently with the court that combined Cambodian and international court. How do you feel that the functioning of that court has changed the way people are talking about or thinking about the history of the Khmer Rouge regime?
SOCHEATA POEUV: I’d like to think that they’re thinking about it a lot more and engaging in conversations and dialogues with their family members and their neighbors about what is happening. So for those who experienced it it’s an opportunity to affirm the experience that they had. Oftentimes survivors, you know, 30 years after the fact begin to wonder if this really happened to them and begin to wonder if it really was as bad as it was, you know? Things like the Tribunal help to affirm that, yes, this did happen and it really was an important event that needs to be recorded by history and really needs to be understood and for the truth to be revealed.
For people of my generation who didn’t go through this, I think it’s an opportunity to learn that it happened. There’s an astonishing phenomenon going on in Cambodia now where-- because young people aren’t taught this part of history in schools and before the Tribunal started it wasn’t reflected in a lot of media in Cambodia. There’s a phenomenon of the younger generation not believing that the Khmer Rouge happened, the Khmer Rouge genocide happened, not believing that it was as bad as it was, not believing that it was Cambodians killing Cambodians. For the truth to come out in this moment is hugely important and impactful I think on society.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: For those of you interested in learning more about Socheata’s ongoing oral testimony project, you can visit the Website Khmerlegacies.org and for more information about the film please visit NewYearBaby.net. Thank you.
NARRATOR: You have been listening to Voices on Genocide Prevention, from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. To learn more about responding to and preventing genocide, join us online at www.ushmm.org/genocide.
