Thet Sambath tries to get Brother Number Two to admit the truth in compelling, deeply personal documentary
ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE: ONE MAN’S JOURNEY TO THE HEART OF THE KILLING FIELDS (Thet Sambath & Rob Lemkin, 2009)
Opens Friday, July 30
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St.
212-255-2243
www.enemiesofthepeoplemovie.com
www.quadcinema.com
As a young boy, Thet Sambath lost his mother, father, and brother during the Cambodian genocide of the mid- to late 1970s, immediately following the Vietnam War. Led by Pol Pot, known as Brother Number One, and Nuon Chea, Brother Number Two, the Khmer Rouge murdered nearly two million of its fellow citizens in the name of Communism, dumping the bodies in mass graves that journalist Dith Pran famously termed the Killing Fields. In order to reveal the truth about what happened during that horrific period, Sambath became an investigative journalist himself, dedicating weekends for ten years to meeting with the men and women who actually committed the murders, rural peasants who were ordered to commit crimes against humanity — and did so seemingly with little regret. But Sambath’s primary goal was to get Nuon Chea, a fiercely proud and private man, to talk about his involvement in the genocide and share the full story of what happened for the first time. Part historical document, part personal journey, told in a compelling procedural narrative, ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE is an eye-opening film that finally gets to the bottom of one of the most brutal dictatorships of the twentieth century. Sambath, teaming with British filmmaker Rob Lemkin, who himself lost family during the Holocaust, risks everything to seek out the truth and try to put his country back on the road to reconciliation.