NEW YEAR BABY, A Cambodian-American documentary film by Socheata Poeuv
Faces of Social Entrepreneurship
Socheata Poeuv
27, Khmer Legacies, New Haven
Poeuv was born in a Thai refugee camp to Cambodian parents who fled the Khmer Rouge. She was 22 when her parents revealed that the two women she thought were her older sisters were in fact her mother's sister's daughters, orphaned by Pol Pot's regime. She also discovered that her older brother was her half brother - a surviving child from her mother's murdered first husband. Her curiosity about her parents' long silence led her to make a film about her personal history, called "New Year Baby." She has now started "Khmer Legacies," a project in which children interview their parents about surviving the Cambodian genocide and which she hopes will result in 10,000 videotaped testimonials. "You've got to change the silence that surrounds this, and the way that Cambodian parents talk to their children and children talk to their parents. There really is a threat of this culture being completely invisible if people don't step forward to remember and distinguish it."
Source: New York Times
NEW YEAR BABY
-Winner of 8 international awards including the Movies That Matter Award - an Amnesty International initiative, broadcast on national PBS and screened to sold out audiences from New York to Phnom Penh, NEW YEAR BABY tells a heart warming story of love, joy and pardon.
Born in a Thai refugee camp on Cambodian New Year, filmmaker Socheata Poeuv grew up in the United States deemed by her family "the lucky one," fated to good fortune.
As a child in the United States, she knew that her parents had survived oppression and genocide under the Khmer Rouge, but they never spoke of it aloud
Twenty-five years later in the suburbs of Texas, her parents make a startling admission, and the impact of the Khmer Rouge suddenly becomes very real. Impelled to confront and give human face to her childhood shadows, Socheata travels to Cambodia to unravel the mystery shrouding her family's survival and eventual escape. Her voyage parallels her family's emotional journey through a series of revelations: unimaginable sacrifice; promises made and kept; the fierce and solemn love for those who were left behind, and finally, one long unsung hero, a "Cambodian cowboy," is unveiled.
With disarming candor, humor and poetic animation Poeuv's debut feature resurrects memory and personal history to reclaim her family's past, and what is easily a heartbreaking story also becomes one of triumph. NEW YEAR BABY is a testament to one father's extraordinary bravery, and the love that binds a family together.
Refusing to allow this national tragedy to be erased from the collective memory of new generations, NEW YEAR BABY gives a voice to both familial memories and Cambodia's history, challenging the Khmer Rouge principle, "If you preserve secrecy, half the battle is won."
Asian-Am Film Fest: Inside 2 stunning films by Asian American women directors: "Tie a Yellow Ribbon" by Joy Dietrich and "New Year Baby" by Socheata Poeuv. Both nominated for Emerging Director awards in the upcoming Asian American Intl Film Festival, the women focus on universal questions of identity, family, heritage and friendship.
