FILM

Holocaust Museum Houston will present a free screening of the film Enemies of the People, an award-winning documentary on the 1970s genocide in Cambodia, this November as part of the Museum’s First Thursdays program. The screening, held in collaboration with the award-winning documentary series POV (www.pbs.org/pov ), will be shown Thursday, Nov. 3, 2011, at 6:30 p.m. in the Museum’s Albert and Ethel Herzstein Theater, in the Morgan Family Center at 5401 Caroline St., in Houston’s Museum District.

The Khmer Rouge, the ruling party in Cambodia during the 1970s, slaughtered nearly 2 million people as part of a purge of the party to rid it of a "Vietnamese faction," people they believed were conspiring with their erstwhile allies to re-establish Vietnam’s traditional dominance of Cambodia." Yet the “Killing Fields” of Cambodia remain largely unexplained. Enter Thet Sambath, an unassuming investigative journalist who lost his family in the conflict and spent a decade gaining the trust of the men and women who perpetrated the massacres. From the foot soldiers who slit throats to Pol Pot's right-hand man, the notorious Brother Number Two, Sambath and co-director Rob Lemkin record shocking testimony in their groundbreaking film, “Enemies of the People.”

In the film, Sambath is on a personal quest to discover not how but why his family died. In doing so, he hears and understands for the first time the real story of his country's tragedy.

“Some may say no good can come from talking to killers and dwelling on past horror, but I say these people have sacrificed a lot to tell the truth,” he said. “In daring to confess they have done good, perhaps the only good thing left. They and all the killers like them must be part of the process of reconciliation if my country is to move forward.”

Winning more than 20 awards at film festivals across the world, including the World Jury Special Prize at Sundance in 2010, the documentary depicts a nation struggling to come to terms with its past mistakes.

Sambath 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; and as a human rights investigator for LICADHO. He was most recently named the winner of the 2011 Knight International Journalism Award.

Lemkin is the founder and director of Old Street Films. He has produced and directed more than 50 documentaries for BBC, Channel 4, ITV, Sky, The History Channel 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” in 2003, “Malaya: The Undeclared War” in 1998 and “Who Really Killed Aung San?” in 1997, among others.

“My own personal connection to Cambodia is non-existent, but my connection to genocide is not,” Lemkin said. “Many members of my father’s family died at the hands of the Nazis, and a rather remote relative of mine, Raphael Lemkin, even coined the term ‘genocide.’”

“Enemies of the People” is a production of Old Street Films and Thet Sambath in association with American Documentary, Inc. and POV.