Examiner.com
“The Conscience of Nhem En,” by acclaimed filmmaker Steven Okazaki, made its television debut Wednesday, July 8, on HBO2, at 8 pm (ET).The half-hour movie received an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Short Film in the 2008 Academy Awards earlier this year.
Nhem En was a 16-year old Khmer Rouge soldier when he photographed thousands of men, women and children who faced certain torture and death at Tuol Sleng, a Phnom Penh high school converted into a nightmarish prison/interrogation center.
There, from 1975-1979, during Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge era, 17,000 Cambodians were registered and photographed, suspected of being involved with U.S. or Russian intelligence organizations.
The photographs are a sobering reminder of the Cambodian holocaust, En’s lenses capturing the haunted stares of victim after victim, forced into a special chair facing En’s camera, eyes straight ahead, frozen with terror, knowing their fate: unspeakable pain and horror just steps away from the chair, where the screams were coming from.
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