User:OSFEOTP/Enemies of the People Movie

ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE is a 2009 documentary film directed and produced by Rob Lemkin and Thet Sambeth and made by Old Street Films. One of the most harrowing and compelling personal documentaries of our time, ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE exposes for the first time the truth about the Killing Fields and the Khmer Rouge who were behind Cambodia’s horrific genocide. In ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE the men and women who perpetrated the massacres – from the foot-soldiers who slit throats to the party’s ideological leader, Nuon Chea aka Brother Number Two – break a 30-year silence to give testimony never before heard or seen. More than simply an inquiry into Cambodia’s experience, however, ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE is a profound meditation on the nature of good and evil, shedding light on the capacity of some people to do terrible things and for others to forgive them.

"Stunning... Amazing... One of the most gripping and moving films I have ever seen." Andrew Marr, BBC Radio

SYNOPSIS

Winner of 14 top documentary festival awards, including a Special Jury Prize at Sundance and the Grand Jury Award at the Full Frame Documentary Festival, this is a riveting film that takes audiences as close to witnessing evil as they are ever likely to get. It is also a personal journey into the heart of darkness by journalist/filmmaker Thet Sambath, whose family was wiped out in the Killing Fields, but whose patience and discipline elicits unprecedented on-camera confessions from perpetrators at all levels of the Khmer Rouge hierarchy. This is investigative journalism of the highest order.

In 1974, Thet Sambath’s father became one of the nearly two million people who were murdered by the Khmer Rouge when he refused to give them his buffalo. Sambath’s mother was forced to marry a Khmer Rouge militiaman and died in childbirth in 1976, while his eldest brother disappeared in 1977. Sambath himself escaped Cambodia at age 10 when the Khmer Rouge fell in 1979.

Fast forward to 1998, and Sambath, now a journalist, got to know the children of some senior Khmer Rouge cadre and gradually earned their trust. Then, for a decade, he spent weekends visiting the home of the most senior surviving leader, Nuon Chea, aka Brother Number Two under Pol Pot. “But he never used to say anything different from what he told Western journalists,” says Sambath, “‘I was low-ranking,’ ‘I knew nothing,’ ‘I am not a killer.’ Then one day he said to me ‘Sambath, I trust you, you are the person I would like to tell my story to. Ask me what you want to know.’ For the next five years he told me the truth, as he saw it, including all the details of killing.”

Sambath also won the confidence of lower-level Khmer Rouge soldiers, now ordinary fathers and grandfathers, who demonstrated to him how they slit people’s throats. For these murderers, it was the first time they admitted what they had done. He taped their interactions and discussions about the killings, and together with British documentarian Rob Lemkin they created this landmark film.

For Sambath, it has been an ongoing, lifelong personal journey to discover what was behind such horror; he neglected both his family and his own happiness in the search for truth with hope of reconciliation. ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE is at once a cinematically beautiful, chillingly insightful, and deeply personal piece of documentary filmmaking.

THE FILMMAKERS

THET SAMBATH (director/producer) is a senior reporter with the Phnom Penh Post, Cambodia’s premier English-language newspaper. He is widely regarded as one of Cambodia’s best investigative reporters and his stories have been syndicated all over the world.

He has worked for the American Refugee Committee as a paramedic on the Thai-Cambodia border; as police interpreter for the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC); and as a human rights investigator for LICADHO. Since 1994 he has worked as producer, translator and camera operator for many world broadcasting organisations including BBC, WGBH Frontline, NHK and NBC. In 2002 he travelled to the US on a Jefferson Scholarship.

He lives in Phnom Penh with his wife and their two children.

ROB LEMKIN (director/producer) is the founder and director of Old Street Films. He has produced and directed over 50 documentaries for BBC, Channel 4, ITV, Sky, The History Channel (US) and Arts & Entertainment. He has won numerous awards in Britain and abroad, and his work has appeared in major documentary strands for C4, BBC and ITV. He has made several films about the history and politics of Asia including The Real Dr Evil (BBC/Arts & Entertainment 2003), Who Really Killed Aung San? (BBC2 1997), Malaya: The Undeclared War (BBC2 1998), China: Handle with Care (C4 2001) Bearers of the Sword (C4 2002).

Other areas of work include music and investigative journalism. Music films include documentaries with Nina Simone, Curtis Mayfield, Bobby Womack and Chet Baker (recently in retrospective at the National Film Theatre, London); the 1986 Channel 4 feature doc Ten Days That Shook Soho; Black & White Trio, a 1989 Tate Gallery installation with composer Gabriel Jackson and artist Richard Long; an authorised musical biography of Nelson Mandela, Viva Mandela! (1990) narrated by Kenneth Kaunda.

From 2001 to 2005 he ran an investigations unit for Britain’s Channel Four News producing dozens of hard-hitting films on subjects as diverse as: Chinese snakeheads, Russian oligarchs, oil prospecting in Darfur, pension finance, the privatisation of British healthcare, working conditions in call centres, and gangmasters’ exploitation of undocumented labour. Many of these exposés hit their mark and influenced the way their targets or the authorities behaved.

He lives in Oxford with his partner and their four children.

DISTRIBUTION

The film is being released on 30 July 2010 in New York by International Film Circuit (InFC) at the Quad Cinema, then Laemmle’s Music Hall in Beverly Hills. After that calendar releasing around the USA.

World TV sales are being handled by Films Transit of Montreal, the world’s leading distributor of quality documentaries.

In the UK and Ireland Dogwoof will be releasing the film to cinemas in October 2010.

AWARDS

Winner, Nestor Almendros Prize, Human Rights Watch Film Festival 2010

Winner, True Life Award, True/False 2010

Winner, Special Jury Prize, World Cinema Documentary, Sundance 2010

Winner, Top Ten Audience Choice, IDFA 2009

Winner, Best Documentary, Santa Barbara 2010

Winner, Social Justice Award, Santa Barbara 2010

Winner, Best Documentary, Vera, Finland 2010

Winner, Grand Jury Prize, One World 2010

Winner, Outstanding Documentary Award, Hong Kong 2010

Winner, Anne Dellinger Grand Jury Award, Full Frame 2010

Winner, Charles E Guggenheim Emerging Artist Award, Full Frame 2010

Winner, Best Documentary, Beldocs 2010

Winner, Best Documentary, Oxdox 2010

Winner, Silver Horn Award, Krakow 2010

EXTERNAL LINKS

OFFICIAL WEBSITE

INTERNATIONAL FILM CIRCUIT http://www.internationalfilmcircuit.com/enemies/index.html

FILMS TRANSIT www.filmstransit.com

DOGWOOF www.dogwoof.com

REFERENCES

"AN INSPIRING FILM" Stephen Holden, New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/11/movies/11human.html

CINEMA RELEASE PLANNED [http://blogs.indiewire.com/iwnow/archives/2010/06/09/full_frame_winner_enemies_of_the_people_to_be_released_this_summer

DOCUMENTARY CO PRODUCER DEFENDS DEALING WITH TRIBUNAL

JUDGES UNABLE TO GET KHMER ROUGE FILM:

AJ SCHNACK on the films awards at the Full Frame Documentary Festival

ROB LEMKIN ON BBC RADIO 4'S START THE WEEK PROGRAMME. 

KHMER ROUGE KILLING MACHINE EXPLORED AT SUNDANCE

BEFRIENDING THE KHMER ROUGE: