Angkar

“It was chaos. There were no more identity papers, no justice, no doctors, no property deeds, no intellectuals, no currency, no memory…” Born from her parents’ forced marriage in a detention village in Cambodia, the filmmaker, follows her father Khonsaly as he returns to Ta Seng, to where he had been deported during the Khmer Rouge genocide. Neary Adeline Hay shows the extent to which his return home after 30 years of exile involves a path of resilience, in a countryside where, as a city dweller, he was forced to live for four long years. Despite the smoothness of the Steadicam tracking shots and the softness of the daughter’s and father’s voice-overs, it is towards conversations with his former tormentors and jailers that the camera follows him: they are elderly but alive and have remained in the village. Yet, Khonsaly enters into dialogues that avoid confrontation. Given the horrifically precise accounts of abuse as told by criminals eager to lay all blame on the regime or pass themselves off as victims, his capacity to listen approaches the heroic. We understand that he has endured this for the sake of three generations: his own, which he has to represent as “a survivor out of thousands of deaths”; that of the village teenagers, who have grown up carefree “without knowing who their parents and grandparents are”; but also, thanks to the gesture of transmission that makes this film essential, the generation of his daughter, who receives words that have at long last been liberated. (Charlotte Garson)