Stepping up to a new stage

Cambodian film will celebrate its largest cinematic premiere since the days of Norodom Sihanouk when Cambodian Son debuts Jan 29 with a red-carpet gala affair at Major Cineplex. The film opens citywide Jan 30.

Produced by Anida Yoeu Ali and directed by Japanese filmmaker Masahiro Sugano, Cambodian Son follows Kosal Khiev, a Cambodian-American spoken word artist and ex-convict, on his journey to the United Kingdom to perform in the 2012 Cultural Olympiad, an international poetry event held in parallel to the Olympics.

Cambodian Son is a documentary. But in the hands of Sugano, until now a fiction filmmaker, the movie unravels like a feature film. In Khiev, Sugano finds a compelling, flawed character and unlikely underdog to represent Cambodia in the 2012 event, also known as the Poetry Parnassus.

Cambodian Son represents the latest in a growing body of powerful contemporary cinema that includes Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture, which was nominated for an Oscar in 2014, Kulikar Sotho’s The Last Reel, Davy Chou’s Golden Slumbers and Kalyanne Mam’s A River Changes Course.

“It just feels like we are back,” said Ali of her country and its once again burgeoning arts and cinema scene. “We almost died. All of this almost got annihilated. Our culture was desecrated to rock bottom. We were left for dead with nobody around and, just like Kosal’s story, we’re all climbing out of it and back to the light, back to life.”

At the time of Khiev’s selection, the Parnassus was the planet’s largest-ever gathering of poets. Each country participating in the 2012 Olympic Games sent a single representative. More than 6,000 were nominated. Only 204 were chosen.

Khiev’s selection to the Parnassus was the event that compelled the trio to start filming. The moment seemed too big to let slip away, even if everyone involved sensed that the road ahead was likely to be rocky. “It just felt like if we didn’t start rolling the camera then we were going to lose it, lose the moment and all the things that come with that,” Ali said. “It was impulsive.”

Sugano, a filmmaker trained in fiction and production, perhaps knew best the dangers of documentary moviemaking. The Osaka native completed his master’s at the University of Illinois in Chicago, the city of Hoop Dreams, an award-winning, $11 million grossing documentary about high-school basketball players. The crew originally estimated three weeks for filming. It ended up taking eight years.

“In a documentary, you keep filming without knowing when it’s going to end,” said Sugano, who is Ali’s husband and co-conspirator in Studio Revolt, the couple’s Phnom Penh media collaborative. “It seems ridiculous to me. You have to be crazy. As a matter of fact, all the documentary filmmakers I have met are crazy. It doesn’t make any economic sense – time, money, nothing.“

Yet, Sugano found it impossible to say no. Khiev was too rare a talent, the injustices done to him were too great, the social problems he personified were too widespread, and his selection to the Parnassus was too significant to leave the story untold.

“Kosal is a poster child for so many social and historical issues,” Sugano said. “He’s a poster child for the conflict in Southeast Asia, issues of immigration, racism in the US, gang problems, the war on drugs, excessive incarceration for children, hate, xenophobia, deportation, all those things I only read about in the newspaper.”

Kosal Khiev was born March 12, 1980, in a refugee camp on the Thai border. He immigrated as an infant to California, in the United States, with his mother and eight older siblings. He never knew his father, a man who, like so many others, disappeared from the camps and was never heard from again.

Khiev struggled to find his place growing up in Santa Ana, CA, a densely populated urban area about 30 kilometres east of Long Beach. He was in trouble early (and often). When he was 13, his mother shipped him to the New Bethany Home for Boys, a Christian school in Arcadia, Louisiana.

New Bethany seemed just as troubled as Khiev, if not more so. The home was often under investigation by police or welfare authorities. Stories of abuse that escaped from its barbed-wire fences included children being beaten with golf clubs and PVC pipe (PVC stood for “pound victims cruelly,” the children joked). Police found one 14-year-old boy “bound, in his underwear, on the floor of a dark and padlocked isolation cell,” according to reports.

After a year at New Bethany, Khiev returned to Santa Ana. At 16, he was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to 16 years in prison. Because he had never completed a citizenship test, upon his release in 2010, at age 30, he was seized by immigration officials. Khiev spent another year in an immigration detention centre before being deported to Cambodia, a country in which he had never once set foot.

Against nearly impossible odds, Khiev grew up and got his mind right in prison. He took university classes and joined an art program. “You feel worthless when you’re in prison,” Khiev said. “You feel like you hold no valuable space. You’re just here in a cage. So on the inside, you try to create worth, you try to create value.”

Khiev found his greatest salvation in poetry and spoken word, and he planned for a day he could pursue his art on the outside. His dreams were almost prophetic.

“I used to talk to the guys inside, and we’d talk about dreams.

‘So, what do you want to do?’

‘Man, one day, I’ll be in the Olympics. Not participating in the Olympics, I just want to go to the Olympics. That’s just one of those things I want to do.’ Especially after the Beijing games, I was like, ‘Wow, this is spectacular. That’s what humans can actually do when coming together. One day. One day I will be there.’”

Getting selected for the Parnassus put that “one day” on his calendar. “I just couldn’t believe it,” Khiev said. “It’s a dream to even think about it. This is one of the biggest stages I’ll ever be on.”

It was bigger than the Apollo or Def Jam Poetry stages he had fantasised about performing on while honing his craft in solitary confinement. “This was even bigger than that,” Khiev said. “I couldn’t even fathom; wow, is this all really happening?”

But first came the challenge of living it all out in front of Sugano’s camera, an assignment more complex than it first appeared.

“In the beginning it was really rough, because you’re always so conscious of someone there filming your every word, every action,” Khiev said. “I felt really vulnerable and uncomfortable.”

The creative process at times weighed heavily on all of them. Not only were they close friends, they were now work colleagues and three extremely passionate artists, each with strong ideas. Filming tested the strength of their relationships.

“As a media collaborative for us – myself, Masahiro and Kosal – I think it’s really been an incredible journey,” Ali said. ”Would we repeat it? I don’t know.”

The trio started with almost no money, and in the beginning it was financially difficult for everyone. Sugano was demanding, and Khiev, still coming to terms with life on the outside, often seemed unprepared for the rigours of a daily production schedule.

“It was hard,” Khiev said. “Masa is kind of like this totalitarian director. He wants what he sees and he sees what he wants.”

Sugano doesn’t completely disagree. “I’m Japanese, right? So I got my work ethic. It is embedded, beaten in, in Japan,” he said. “I also come from the film industry, which is really regimented, and you can still get cussed at as an intern. So there is that culture of severe commitment that I come from. I expect the same here. My wife always warns me not to bring out my Japanese on the Khmer people in my work expectations, but I can’t help it.”

Still, he realised that not everyone comes from the same privileged background that he did.

“Kosal himself is also not the most stable, boring person,” Sugano said. “He’s got temperament. He’s an artist. He spent time in prison. So he’s not necessarily the most well-adjusted in the ways of fulfilling commitments and what not. So I was always afraid that he might just disappear. That was always a big concern for me. So I didn’t know how much I could push him to find stories. There were moments when I had to take two steps back and give him room. That was the hardest part, actually.”

Slowly the three of them began to find, if not a groove, at least a tenable peace where they could all work and learn. A shared commitment to the bigger picture kept them focused.

“I knew from the get-go that I couldn’t do this for my career,” Sugano said. “I couldn’t do this for Kosal’s career. I had to do it for something bigger. And I actually talked about this with Kosal many times, because he was going to have to reveal a side of himself that he might not want people to see. But the bottom line was that this had nothing to do with me or him. When this story comes out, it will serve a cause much bigger than who we are. And that’s why we are anointed to be part of it. In many ways, we were sacrificed for something bigger. His privacy was sacrificed. My time and sanity were sacrificed.”

That bigger cause holds slightly different contours for each of them. For Sugano, his cause is the fight against the culture of hate and fear spreading across the globe. It’s based on labeling, us and them, and it allows us to castigate others without considering the humanity of our actions.

“We skip out on thinking of people as people,” Sugano said. “We just fall back on the label and get rid of people and that’s exactly how these guys got kicked out. They got labeled as criminal aliens.”

For Ali and Khiev, Cambodian Son takes on far more personal tones. “I think Kosal can really bring a complexity to the intersection of so many of these issues, whether it’s justice or immigration or geo-politics or the past Cambodia-US relations,” Ali said. “I think he can put a human face on it. In the end, he is somebody’s son who just wants to be home and to find where he belongs.”

That sense of belonging, or lack of it, seems pervasive among many Cambodian communities. Khmers who grow up abroad often struggle to find their place in foreign cultures. And in Cambodia, members of the diaspora are often viewed as less than native-born Khmers.

“For a local Khmer to watch this movie and then find a way to relate to this individual that looks nothing like their world, that to me is what it’s about,” Ali said. “That moment of relating to the outsider, to the underdog, that to me is that moment of finally connecting the diaspora with the Khmer who are here, that union of finally making Cambodia and the Khmer identity whole.”

“We need to feel good about who we are, because being who we were, that’s what got us in trouble,” she said. “Being artists, being middle class people, being professionals, that is what they tried to annihilate in that terrible revolution. But they can’t squash the spirit.”