Sundance Film Review: Enemies of the People

Nuon Chea (R) talking to Thet Sambath

01/23/10
By Dan Nailen
Salt Lake Magazine (Blog)

Thet Sambath (pictured left) is a Cambodian newspaper journalist whose father was murdered by the Khmer Rouge in 1974, and whose mother was forced to marry a Khmer Rouge militiaman two years later.

For a decade, Sambath spent his free time journeying into the notorious "killing fields" of his home country to try and understand why so many of Cambodia's people were murdered. The result of that work is Enemies of the People, which Sambeth co-directed and produced with Rob Lemkin.

The film revolves around the relationship Sambath established with Nuon Chea, aka "Brother Number Two" (pictured below with Sambeth) and dictator Pol Pot's right-hand man. It took Sambeth years of gaining Chea's trust before he opened up and admitted that he and Pol Pot had plotted the killings as a means of defending their communist vision from "enemies of the people." Chea doesn't ever express remorse for the program he calls the "solution," but he does to Sambeth directly when the reporter tells the old man about his own family's relationship with the Khmer Rouge.

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