HOME AND AWAY.

Many Uch and his family spent over two years in refugee camps in Thailand
before being accepted as refugees into the U.S. (Photo/Many Chout Uch/ITVS)

Loeun Lun stands in front of his new home in Siem Reap, Cambodia.
(Photo/Howard Shack/ITVS)
From The Asian Reporter, V17, #17 (April 24, 2007), page 11 & 16.
More loss after so much sorrow
Sentenced Home
Produced and directed by
Nicole Newnham and David Grabias
Presented by the Center for Asian American Media for
"Independent Lens"
By Ronault L.S. Catalani
Sentenced Home is the latest sad chapter in Cambodia’s modern
history. So bad. But it hasn’t always been so. Not for these gentle people,
not for this once-proud nation.
In another time, Cambodia was grand. Her legendary Angkor
philosopher-kings reversed rivers and raised irrigated golden rice twice a
year. They raised astonishing temple-palaces almost all the way to heaven.
But then bad things started happening. Things got so bad, so rapidly, that
in the awful end (1975-79) Cambodia began to devour herself. It was, of
course, in the vacuum of America’s startling defeat and sudden retreat from
Southeast Asia.
Dark Years followed. Acclaimed filmmakers David Grabias and Nicole
Newnham’s fine-focused documentary Sentenced Home picks up the tale
in Seattle, in post-9/11 America.
Children of Cambodia’s nightmare, the ones blessed enough not to lie in
Khmer Rouge mass graves — the ones careful enough to weave an escape through
frontier province minefields, lucky enough to get housed in Thai border
camps and picked for resettlement in the U.S. — are now young American men.
The three guys center stage in Sentenced Home have not done well.
Their families have not integrated into happy American dreaming.
Grabias and Newnham’s work seems an effort not to let us forget. Our
culture often moves so impulsively, trying to resolve complex conflicts
quickly, forcefully. The directors, in association with the Center for Asian
American Media (CAAM) and the Emmy Award-winning PBS series "Independent
Lens," are slowing us down. Bringing us back.
Sentenced Home is a long and unflinching look at the sobering and
continuing human cost of a rushed and uninformed intervention into a faraway
part of our aching planet. And what happens when casualties of our failed
foreign policy — traumatized elders and parents and babies, folk from a
suddenly destroyed traditional agrarian society — are rapidly resettled into
low-rent/high-neglect American communities. Our ghettos.
Unflinching documentary
Sentenced Home won’t let you look away from the quiet misery of Khmer
country folk dropped into the ugly eastside of urban Seattle. Many Uch’s ma
may’ve been an able mother in any Asian rice village from the chilly Korean
peninsula to the sweltering timur end of the Indonesian archipelago, but she
had no way of knowing how to parent her frightened little boy, she had no
way of understanding him when he turned into an angry and stoned teen. Of
course he was a bad Asian son, and just as surely he became an American
criminal.
What’s worse, no one in this anxious mother’s woefully unprepared ethnic
enclave had a clue what draconian consequences her boy’s behavior would have
if she didn’t learn to read and write, then didn’t learn American civics,
then didn’t go downtown to apply, then take, then pass the U.S. citizenship
test. How would they? How could she?
"I go to school," says a proudly hung paper in her child-like scrawl.
"I learn at school
w ater
freedom
liberty."
Irony or America’s tank on empty.
Today, 30 years after Cambodia’s Killing Fields, 1,500 young men, all of
them convicted of felonies, some little some big, all of them legally
defined as "aggravated" under increasingly xenophobic U.S. immigration law,
are getting sent back. Sentenced home.
Loeun Lun fired a handgun as he ran from gang guys in a suburban mall
parking lot; no one was hit, but he was charged with felony assault and he
pled guilty. The court sent him to prison for 11 months. He did the time for
his crime. Eight years later, he was suddenly jailed, taken away from his
old mother, taken from his young wife and their baby girls, and from his job
of providing for them. His wife Saroum quickly sells their car, gives up
their apartment, and moves in with Loeun’s elder sister. Their little girls
get to see their father in prison orange, during visiting hours. U.S.
Immigration officers put him back behind bars until such time as the new
Republic of Kampuchea would take him back. Loeun was not a U.S. citizen, so
he gets deported. His pretty daughters have to do without his fathering,
without his salary. In their neglected neighborhood. How could we?
Three guys, from sad to bad
Sentenced Home is about three such young Seattle guys: Loeun the
disappeared dad, the thug Kim Ho Ma (a.k.a. K-9), and gentle Many. Many’s
Little League Stor-More Jets are 0-8 for the season but they’re a world
better off than Many’s battered generation, because of Many.
The camera follows them in polished handcuffs, in tearful partings, and
in return to chaotic Phnom Penh and dirt-poor villages.
This is a difficult documentary. It is a story redeemed by the sincerity
of these simple rice people, still unwashed, still hopelessly
unsophisticated, in the shadow of towering Seattle. It is redeemed by the
dogged persistence of their pubic defender. It is redeemed by the quiet
whirr and sober witness of Ms. Newnham’s camera.
Sentenced Home the film will be broadcast locally by Oregon Public
Broadcasting within weeks of Portland’s national forum on the U.N.-sponsored
Crimes Against Humanity Tribunal. The symposium features international
experts, Cambodian and American professors, authors, and activists who will
discuss the Khmer Rouge genocide and the generations of sorrow that
followed. Thirty years or 5,000 miles notwithstanding.
Opening events for the Khmer Rouge Tribunal Forum will be held at 6:00pm
on Friday, April 27 at the Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization (IRCO),
located at 10301 N.E. Glisan Street in Portland. On Saturday, panels of
speakers will share their stories from 10:00am to 6:00pm at Portland State
University’s Smith Memorial Student Union Ballroom. All programs are free
and open to the public.
Sichan Siv, a Khmer Rouge survivor, former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N.,
and author of Golden Bones, will serve as keynote speaker. Panelists
include: Alex Hinton, Ph.D., author of Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the
Shadow of Genocide; Beth Van Schaack, J.D., legal advisor to the
Documentation Center of Cambodia; Craig Etcheson, Ph.D., investigator at the
Office of the Co-Prosecutors, Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of
Cambodia; Daran Kravanh, survivor of the Khmer Rouge, musician, and author
of Music Through the Dark; Leakhena Nou, Ph.D., researcher of mental
health and well-being among Khmer refugees; Loung Ung, author of First
They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers; and Rath Ben,
MSW, a program manager at the Intercultural Psychiatric Program at Oregon
Health & Science University.
For more information, contact Kilong Ung at (503) 267-4631, e-mail <kilongung@kilongung.com>,
or visit <www.CACOregon.org>. To read
more about Ung’s journey, visit <www.kilongung.com>.
Sentenced Home will air on Oregon Public Broadcasting on Tuesday, May
15 at 11:00pm. To learn more, visit <www.opb.org>. |