True/False Films

Enemies of the People

In person: directors Rob Lemkin and Thet Sambath

Thet Sambath's father was among the approximately two million people who died under the Khmer Rouge regime in the late 1970s. Sambath has spent the last decade of his life gaining the trust of some of the people who perpetrated those horrors, neglecting both his family and his own happiness in his obsessive search for the truth. In this powerfully restrained film, Sambath talks to men as they demonstrate how they used to slit people's throats, and he calmly gains the trust of Brother Number Two, Pol Pot's next-in-command. Co-directed by Sambath and British filmmaker Rob Lemkin, many of the film's most beautiful and chilling scenes take place in the Cambodian countryside, the original Killing Fields, showing how the past can continue to haunt the present. Enemies of the People bears urgent witness to a man confronting his own past and a nation attempting to heal itself. (IK) Sponsored by The Crossing, which will host a post-screening discussion at The Rome Restaurant (114 S. 9th St.) from 2:30-4:00pm on Saturday, Feb. 27.

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