Angkar review – sublime documentary contends with legacy of Khmer Rouge
Neary Adeline Hay’s film follows her father back to Cambodia and the sites of appalling abuse in a painful struggle to come to terms with atrocious memories
Phuong Le
Mon 9 Aug 2021 10.00 BST

The collective trauma inflicted by the Khmer Rouge regime is so momentous that it seems to exceed whatever medium that tries to retell its stories. At the centre of the horrors is an incomprehensible level of evil that neither words nor visual arts can effectively grasp. And yet, Neary Adeline Hay’s sublime Angkar, which begins in darkness and gently, achingly feels its way around the weight of this historical chapter, manages to arrive at a place of stability, and perhaps even emotional resolution.

The film follows the return of Hay’s father, Khonsaly Hay, to Cambodia after fleeing for France 40 years ago, and captures his confrontations with his former torturers in detention camps. Its concerns, however, move beyond these strangely low-key encounters and instead revolve around the fragility of memory and the act of remembering itself. Considering that almost all of Khonsaly’s family were executed under the Khmer Rouge, it is shocking how some of his tormenters think of their victims’ experiences as better than their own.

Indeed, emerging through the film is a collective struggle to remember, to maintain a public memory of harrowing events. An especially haunting sequence follows Khonsaly roaming through the field where his camp once was: despite the decades-long gap, his muscle memory kicks in, and the landscape suddenly turns eerie and familiar, conjuring up the painful past. Yet, on the same site, he also struggles to understand why a bridge looks smaller than in his memories.

Born out of a forced marriage imposed by the Khmer Rouge, Neary Adeline Hay herself is a living memory of the tragedies in flesh and blood, yet she, too, is painfully detached from her own history: her father’s narration is in Khmer and her voiceover is in French. Eschewing archive material and focusing entirely on storytelling and oral history, this evocative film suggests that the very act of narrating is a kind of remembering, too.

Angkar is released on 13 August on True Story.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/a ... hmer-rouge

The film also featured in the Cambodia International Film Festival 2018: post230555.html#p230555

Another movie directed by Adeline Neary Hay and set in Cambodia:

‘Eskape’: IDFA Review
By Neil Young28 November 2021
Neary Adeline Hay retraces the steps she took as a child refugee feeling post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia

Source: IDFA
‘Eskape’
Dir/scr: Adeline Neary Hay. France. 2021. 71mins

Autobiography and travelogue delicately intersect in Adeline Neary Hay’s tough but tender Eskape, in which the director retraces the scenes of her early childhood as a refugee from the ruins of post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia. Clocking in at the same economical 71-minute running-time as her 2018 debut Angkar, it functions most effectively as a heartfelt but commendably unsentimental tribute to Neary Hay’s resilient, resourceful mother Thany Lieng. Bowing in the new Envisions competition at IDFA, the quietly moving miniature should have little difficulty securing further exposure via festivals and small-screen outlets.

Early sequences sketch out the basic details of how Lieng and Neary Hay fled famine and political turmoil circa 1981 to shelter in unsanitary rural camps, first in Cambodia and then Thailand. They eventually made their way to the calmer environs of France, where Neary Hay would grow up and become a mother herself. During discussions about the film and its aims, Lieng makes clear that she has no desire to return to her homeland; the director thus makes the journey solo, exploring the atmospheric but very quiet locations of the once-teeming camps she inhabited as a baby and toddler.

The main locus of the film’s first half is the former site of Khao-I-Dang camp near the Thai border, set in lushly forested, hilly terrain. Neary Hay’s cameras (she shares cinematography credits with Philip Skoczkowski) prowl this area via a fluent deployment of drone and Steadicam technology. The latter niftily mirrors Lieng’s tendency towards perpetual onward motion towards safer havens; “I have to move forward at all costs,” she remarks.

The director, who has a sharp eye for composition, occasionally frames her shots to place herself in the lower middle of the widescreen image — from the viewer’s perspective she thus simultaneously becomes part of the landscape and a surveyor of it.
Full article: https://www.screendaily.com/reviews/esk ... 45.article