
EVERYTHING IS FOR SALE. Stealing Cambodia is set in a
post-Khmer-Rouge Kampuchea where girls are one of the few viable
commodities. (Photo courtesy of Apsara Films)
From The Asian Reporter, V16, #4 (January 24, 2006), page 9.
What money will buy, what money will not
Stealing Cambodia
A film based on Southeast Asia’s sex trade
Directed by Marlin Darrah
Produced by Marlin Darrah and Skye Fitzgerald
Apsara Films, 2003
Starring McGeorge Robinson, Linda Shing, Rob Stockton
By Polo
In our old and elegant corner of the world, Kampuchea’s (Cambodia’s)
neighbors have always looked at the Khmer household with an uneasy mélange
of admiration, joy, and dread. They are an ancient family. They’ve got
fantastical ruins to prove it. They are a sweet folk, ask anyone. They laugh
easy, they love a lot, they’ve had two heaping golden rice harvests a year
as long as any elder auntie’s memory — a legacy of mighty Angkor
philosopher-god-kings. Beneficent fathers, they were, to their adoring,
easily pleased children.
A gentle folk in a generous land, sweet sun and kind rains. What could go
wrong? Lots.
And lots did. Us edgier neighbors knew it could, we feared it would.
Indeed, some of us had a hand in bringing it on. Oh dreamy, defenseless
Kampuchea. Ampun’allah. God have Mercy.
It all went terribly wrong.
Then the dark Dark Years set in.
Today, 25 years later, Kamputs (Cambods) still struggle. Theirs is still
an ugly house, but they are a stubborn folk. Stubborn and tender at the same
time.
Now, Pol Pot and his dark princes are either dead or in flimsy disguise,
but during their demonic reign they disappeared Kampuchea’s best. Poets and
priests and professors, gone. Creative and civil society, simply vanished.
All of it, and all of them, either in exile or in unmarked and shallow
unsanctified graves.
Twenty-five years after the Khmer Rouge is also the setting of
Stealing Cambodia, the first of a twin set of remarkable independent
films reaching across the big Deep Blue from Oregon to Cambodia. The second,
Bombhunters (Spinfilm, 2006), documents the irony of cold cash for
the scrap iron encasing deadly unexploded ordnance buried just under
Kampuchea’s exhausted soil. Bombhunters director Skye Fitzgerald
produced the onsite Kampuchea part of Stealing Cambodia.
Stealing Cambodia is a feature length narrative film. It is, among
other things, a drama about money and romance, and although there is nothing
new about that, the hook of this film is staging it within the weightier
sociological context of a deeply wounded national community. The Portland
protagonists wander into Phnom Penh streets packed with folks doing their
very best to get better, in a country left so far behind her neighbors that
she now finds precious little to trade in our world’s rapidly globalizing
economy.
What remains a viable commodity is girls. Teeny virgins net families and
pimps even more. According to Stealing Cambodia’s director,
Portlander Marlin Darrah, his film is based on stories told him by affluent
Western and Japanese sex buyers and by Southeast Asian sex servers.
The movie’s exotic stage is filled with two white folks in love. There’s
nothing novel about that either — Tarzan and Jane started the genre by
brightening blackest Africa with their affair; Sigourney Weaver and Mel
Gibson’s hot Indonesian nights only made The Year of Living Dangerously
even more so; Indiana Jones did it in Arabia, India, and Old Shanghai.
Mercifully, in Stealing Cambodia the thrashings of those in love,
of those who want to be in love, and those who ask: What’s love got to do
with it? Are doing aaall that in service to the film’s more essential
premise about love’s truth? Untouched. True love.
"Everything is for sale in Cambodia," laments Teedah (played by Linda
Shing). "Even people." In 81 minutes of film time, several Asian girls’
bodies are sold, some white boys’ souls too. Love is lost and found, but
never bought. And that is what lies at the heart of this film: a big-hearted
people, hearts heroic, swollen to near bursting. Simply Kamput.
If only Love could ease Kampuchea’s suffering, if Love could only end her
household’s crushing daily humiliation, in the way it evidently redeems the
film’s Western guy and Eastern girl by the end of its story’s whole-hearted
arc.
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