NikkeiWest--Northern California Japanese American Newspaper

By J.K. Yamamoto

BERKELEY—Bay Area filmmaker Steven Okazaki has tackled a variety of tough subjects in his documentaries — the internment of Japanese Americans, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, hate crimes, heroin addiction, AIDS.

A common theme is how people persevere despite terrible misfortune. But making his Oscar-nominated “The Conscience of Nhem En” was a different experience for Okazaki because he didn’t admire or even like the person he was profiling.

Okazaki spoke at a recent screening held at the Jewish Community Center of the East Bay in connection with the film’s broadcast premiere on HBO. It is now available on DVD.

The Academy Award nomination was his fourth; he was nominated for best feature documentary in 1986 for “Unfinished Business,” the story of three Nisei who challenged the internment in court; he won the Oscar for best short documentary for “Days of Waiting,” a portrait of a Caucasian artist who was interned with her Japanese American husband at Heart Mountain; and he was nominated in 2006 for “The Mushroom Club,” a look at atomic bomb survivors in Japan.

He also received an Emmy in 2008 for another film about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, “White Light/Black Rain,” which aired on HBO.

Okazaki’s latest film took him to Phnom Penh, Cambodia 30 years after Pol Pot’s reign of terror, during which about 1.7 million Cambodians died —  a quarter of the population. He focused on Tuol Sleng Prison, also known as S-21, where some 17,000 men, women and children were executed. The site is now a museum.

The subject of the film is Nhem En, a 16-year-old Khmer Rouge soldier at the time, whose job was to photograph prisoners before they were tortured and killed. Some tried to smile for the camera but others seemed to know they were doomed.

Okazaki also interviewed three people who survived S-21. One, an artist, was ordered to paint portraits of Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot; one was saved because he knew how to fix sewing machines; the third said she did not know why she was spared.

“ I think it was October of 2007 (when) Nhem En came out … and announced that he was the photographer, one of the five staff photographers at S-21,” Okazaki said. “The New York Times did a story on him … I asked the executives at HBO to take a look at the story. They said it was interesting but it was too far away, and Americans have a hard time with foreign stories.”

But the executives had a change of heart and green-lighted the film three months later. Okazaki consulted a Cambodian American friend about the best time to visit Cambodia weather-wise and was told, “There are two weeks of winter in January when the temperature drops below 85. That’s when you should go.”

With just three weeks to prepare, Okazaki put together his crew, including production coordinator Han Ong of San Jose, who lived through the Cambodian genocide as a young man. Shooting took two weeks. Due to the short time frame, trips to Nhem En’s home in northern Cambodia and to the famed Angkor Wat temple complex were scrapped.

“We tried to get some of the guards who were at the prison, but we were just led on a wild goose chase and they clearly did not want us to talk to them, so we weren’t able to,” Okazaki recalled. “We’d be sent out to a village. By the time we got there, we had wasted a day and there was nobody there.”

One former Khmer Rouge soldier seemed like a promising lead. “He said that he had talked to his neighbor many times and his neighbor said, ‘Yes, I was there and I myself killed many of the people.’ That was a whole half-day’s trip out to his village. When we got there, he said, ‘I wasn’t there. I didn’t see anything.’

“The Khmer Rouge soldier who had recommended we do the interview was very frustrated, just kept trying to get him to say anything, but he just sort of laughed. Then the soldier’s wife came over and she told him to shut up.”

Talking to Nhem En

Nhem En was willing to be interviewed, but it appeared that he was being monitored, Okazaki said. “When we were interviewing him, there was a man who was standing there … We assumed he was a handyman because he was holding a broom while he was watching us, but later we saw him coming out of a prominent NGO (non-governmental organization).”

He added, “When Nhem En was doing this interview … he had four phone calls. Three of them, because he answered the phone, ‘Yes, your excellency,’ were clearly from a very high government official. The fourth one was from his wife asking when was the interview going to be over.”

While he was fascinated by the photographs, Okazaki said he initially didn’t want to meet the photographer. Having read the New York Times interview, “I found him sort of despicable.”

He explained, “What’s really important to me when I make a film is that I know it’s going to take a year or three of my life and I want it to be an experience that’s part of my life. So I’ve never done a film where the main subject was someone that I did not admire. It was really difficult.”

While some have argued that Nhem En had no choice, that he would have been killed if he had not done his job, Okazaki countered, “I think that’s understandable once, maybe 100 times, but for me it’s not possible to turn away 6,000 times. He met 6,000 of those people.

“I asked him, ‘Did you even give them a … secret look of sympathy or offer a child, infant or elderly person a glass, a drip of water?’ He said, ‘Absolutely not. Why would I?’ … At one point he said, ‘What do you want me to do? Should I cry about it?’ … It was clear to me that he had no humanity left. The tradeoff was you survive and you give up your humanity.

“For myself, I can certainly imagine trying to tolerate what seems to be an intolerable situation, but how could you stand by, even if it meant your life? I don’t know what I would do really, but … I just immediately hated him.”

During the interview, Okazaki remarked, “I think there’s a cold cruelty to the photos, and I can’t help but think that it reflects the photographer.” Nhem En responded, “The interview’s over. If you want me to continue talking, you have to pay me $40,000.”

“When I said, ‘Everyone in the film gets the same honorarium’ — $500 or $700, which is a lot of money in Cambodia — he said, ‘Oh, that’s fine.’ Then he slapped me on the back and said, ‘We should go get a drink after this.’ ”

Okazaki acknowledged that one of the photographer’s arguments is true — without all that documentation, the world would not have known the full extent of the Cambodian holocaust. “Who would care about Darfur or anything if you don’t have media coming back? … Would we be talking about it at all?”

At the same time, he found it “curious” that such detailed records were kept, and that the photos were of such high quality. “Why did the Nazis bother registering somebody when their main desire was to kill them? You still take all the information — birthdate, birthplace — so in some ways it gives order to just plain barbarism and it makes it seem less barbarous somehow to have a list, to give structure. It’s not chaos.”

In the case of the Khmer Rouge, “Each person had a sheet (listing) birthplace, village, brothers, sisters. And then many people who were tortured had long dossiers where they had to sign confessions.”

Legacy of Genocide

The film comes out at a time when top Khmer Rouge leaders are being put on trial.  (Pol Pot is not among them; he died in 1998.) “That trial will go on for a year or several years. That’s just starting,” Okazaki said. “The big complaint is that it’s only the top five leaders as opposed to the people that actually carried out hundreds of killings … There’s a pretty adamant stand, I think, by the tribunal and many people in government that only the five top people be tried.”

Another complaint is that the defendants are “living in a prison better than (the housing for) 98 percent of the Cambodian people.”

On the positive side, “There is finally is some opening up and truth after 30 years. I guess it’s a beginning and we’ll see where it leads.”

The documentary includes several shots of everyday people. While filming on the streets of Phnom Penh, Okazaki said, “I felt people sort of tense up and there was kind of a posture of what I initially took as hostility. And then I realized it was not what I took as anger, it was fear. There’s still so much fear everywhere.

“As soon as we addressed it, as soon as we showed people respect and said, ‘This is why we’re here … We’d like your help,’ people were incredibly responsive. But it was just that atmosphere … so real everywhere you went.”

While the “killing fields” were 30 years in the past, “it felt like it had just happened,” Okazaki observed. This was especially true of the three S-21 survivors. “I realized immediately that none of the three people were remembering what happened … they were reliving it. That was very hard to see …

“As a filmmaker, it’s easy to say, ‘What do you remember?’ But it’s something else completely to watch them re-experience what they’ve been through.”

Asked if there is a gap between the younger and older generations in terms of historical knowledge, Okazaki responded, “I didn’t experience that disconnect, but most of the adults that I talked to, the people that went through that period, were very frustrated … It was really the older people that were constantly saying,  ‘No one cares. I try to talk my grandchildren. They never listen.’

“But there are Cambodian Americans here. I think that it’s part of their history and even if you don’t know the details, you cannot deny the effects on the generations and what’s passed on. Even if their parents are silent, that silence can be really dangerous as well.”

Okazaki had hoped to do a screening in Cambodia, but “there were two non-profit organizations that started arguing about it, and it got kind of ugly, so I just sort of walked away. We’re trying to take our time and find the best way to show it.”

To order DVDs of “The Conscience of Nhem En” ($19.95 for home use), visit the website of Okazaki’s production company, Farallon Films, at www.farfilm.com. The DVD includes another Okazaki documentary, “Troubled Paradise” (1992), which explores indigenous culture and politics in Hawaii.