Author Archives: basiltsiokos

Opening in NYC today, and in LA next Friday, August 6: ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE

After premiering at IDFA at the end of 2009, Rob Lemkin & Thet Sambath’s documentary went on to screen as part of Sundance‘s World Cinema Documentary Competition this year, winning a Special Jury Prize. It’s gone on to win awards at numerous other festivals, including Full Frame, True/False, One World, Hong Kong, and the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival.

Co-Director Sambath is an integral part of this story, a journalist who spent years getting to know a number of individuals who participated in the genocide against Cambodians under the Khmer Rouge regime. He manages to get them to discuss the past on camera, revealing dark secrets that have left an indelible mark on Cambodia and its people, including survivors like Sambath, who lost multiple family members in the Killing Fields.

ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE is a powerful personal documentary that transcends Sambath’s own story to speak to to a much larger issue – how does a country deal with the legacy of genocide?

Update: indieWIRE has an interview with Rob Lemkin here.

Coming to POV on July 20: EL GENERAL

Natalia Almada’s film debuted in 2009 at Sundance, where she won the award for Best Documentary Director. The film was later nominated for the 2010 Independent Spirit Awards’ Truer Than Fiction Award.

Focusing on the titular figure, Almada’s great-grandfather, one of the country’s most controversial leaders who served as a general during the Mexican Revolution before serving as President from 1924-1928, EL GENERAL weaves together original and archival material from Mexico and Hollywood films in a stunningly wrought examination of both personal and national history and identity. The film succeeds in bridging together decades of history with Almada’s family memoir, uniting the public with the personal in an artful, poignant manner.

To find out more about the POV screening on PBS, click here.