Public Screening of Who Killed Chea Vichea?

July 31, 2009
NEWS RELEASE

PUBLIC SCREENING OF WHO KILLED CHEA VICHEA?

AT RHODE ISLAND INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

Loud Mouth Films is proud to present the first U.S. festival screening of Who Killed Chea Vichea? in Providence, Rhode Island.

Who Killed Chea Vichea? will be screened at 5:20 PM on Friday, Aug 7, at the Columbus Theatre Arts Center, 270 Broadway, Providence, along with the short films In Their Boots: Broken Promise by Abe Greenwald, and Open Air by Shira-Lee Shalit.

Filmed over five years in Cambodia, Who Killed Chea Vichea? is a one-hour documentary thriller about the assassination of Cambodia's top labor leader and the police plot to frame two innocent men. Cambodia is one of the world's largest garment producers and exports some $2 billion worth of garments to the U.S. each year.

On a sunny morning in 2004, two men on a motorbike pulled up at a Phnom Penh newsstand. One of them stepped off, walked over to Chea Vichea, the president of the garment workers union, and calmly shot him in the head and in the heart. Who Killed Chea Vichea? takes us from the dusty streets and slums of Phnom Penh to remote villages, through courtrooms, brothels, factories and gambling dens. It is an unprecedented film about the inner workings of one of the world's most corrupt states.

Produced by Providence native Rich Garella and directed by Bradley Cox, the film was named one of Amnesty International's top ten "Movies That Matter." It is a co-production of Independent Television Services and WGBH Boston.

"There's a large Cambodian community in Providence, and we're going to do our best to reach out to them," Garella said. The festival has already agreed to donate a block of tickets to Providence organization of Cambodian youth.

Contact: Loud Mouth Films: info@loudmouthfilms.net

Festival and ticket info: RI International Film Festival: http://riff.bside.com/2009/films/whokilledcheavichea_riff2009

Film website: Who Killed Chea Vichea?
official site: http://www.whokilledcheavichea.com/

On FaceBook:
Facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=76083065273
Event page: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=100857517875

BACKGROUND AND FILM SYNOPSIS

By 2004, Cambodia was becoming one of the world's largest garment exporters. Foreign-owned factories employed hundreds of thousands of desperate young women who flooded in from the countryside. The country quickly became dependent on garment exports. Its biggest customer was, and is, the United States.

Vichea, the president of Cambodia's free trade union, slept on a straw mat in the union office and didn't collect a salary. Despite beatings and death threats, he rallied the workers as they fought for wage increases, improved working conditions and an end to forced overtime, and often won. He gained an international reputation in the labor movement, and Cambodia gained a reputation as a model country for worker's rights.

But inside Cambodia, the lesson of the Khmer Rouge regime, and of the regimes before and after it, is well known. Ally oneself with power--or face the consequences.

WHO KILLED CHEA VICHEA? is about the killing of one man and the slow silencing of an entire nation. It is about how a small elite keeps an iron grip on power through the use of its police, its army, its manipulation of the courts and its most effective tool: fear. And it is about how hope survives against incredible odds.

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Loud Mouth Films
Philadelphia/Bangkok
http://www.whokilledcheavichea.com/