Filmmaker: Socheata Poeuv
Film: New Year Baby
February 5-14, 2008
About the filmmaker:
Socheata Poeuv has won multiple international cinema awards by the age of 27. She recently made her filmmaking debut with New Year Baby, which won the highest human rights cinema award, the Amnesty International 'Movies That Matter' Award, at its premiere at the 2006 International Documentary Festival Amsterdam. New Year Baby is also slated for national PBS broadcast on Independent Lens in 2008.
Poeuv recently left NBC News Dateline in 2007 and was previously at ABC News World News Tonight Weekend and NBC News TODAY. She co-founded Broken English Productions in New York City and has written for City Limits Magazine, The Daily Hampshire Gazette, DisOriented and The Open Society Justice Initiative. She has spoken at the United Nations, the Yale Law & Divinity Schools, Northwestern Law School, the Harvard Kennedy School and UCLA among others. She works to ensure complete television coverage of the upcoming Khmer Rouge tribunals and her newest project is creating an oral history project in which Cambodian genocide survivors are interviewed by their children. In addition, she is creating a television series around the theme of forgiveness. Poeuv graduated cum laude with a B.A. in English literature from Smith College in 2002 and studied one year at Hertford College, Oxford.
About the film:
New Year Baby is a personal account of director Socheata Poeuv’s exploration of her family’s long kept secret experiences under the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. Born in a Thai refuge camp after her family fled the country, eventually immigrating to America, Poeuv grew up with no understanding of the suffering her parents and older siblings had gone though. Only once she is grown up does her mother reveal the extent of the loss that their family suffered in the Cambodian Genocide—her two older sisters are in fact the daughter’s of Socheta’s murdered aunt, that her brother is only in fact her half brother, born of her mother’s first husband who was murdered along with their daughter by the Khmer Rouge. Shocked, Poeuv feels compelled to return with her parents to Cambodia for the first time in order to gain an understanding of who the Khmer Rouge was, and what they meant to her parents.
The result is a film that brings together elements of a documentary and a travel diary, weaving the history of the Khmer Rouge and Cambodia into the fabric of Poeuv’s own exploration of the country and the frustration she feels with her parents for their reluctance to speak about how the communist regime impacted her family. Poeuv brings these elements together with a filming style that breaks down the traditional fourth wall, and acknowledges the person behind the camera, creating a documentary that is personal, powerful, and above all moving.
Opening Short:
Dear Sweet Emma
Directed by John Cernak (Animation)
As the search is given up for Emma's latest husband, Tucker, a private look reveals that Emma has a secret and uncontrollable dark side. The sweetest angel and favorite citizen of Fishtickle would indeed pose an uncomfortable dilemma for all if her problem were ever found out.
Tour Dates & Locations:
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