Born from a forced marriage during the Khmer Rouge regime, director Neary Adeline Hay travels back to Cambodia with her father, Khonsaly, to face his former Khmer Rouge persecutors. In Ta Saeng, the detention village that they lived together in as prisoners over forty years before, Khonsaly and the remaining inhabitants recount the workings of the sites that became theatres for the deaths of millions. In a contemplative, artful piece of testimony, Hay and her father produce a personal and poetic treatise on the need to record and reactivate memory and not forget the past, however painful it may be.

+ Q&A with director Neary Adeline Hay.

Screens with:
A God’s Shadow | Bernhard Hetzenauer | 2017 | Germany, Austria, Mexico | 20’

Chon, a member of the Native Mexican Wirrárika community, tells the story of his cousin Faustino, son of the shaman of an indigenous settlement in the mountains of Nayarit called La Mora. In the 1980s Faustino had proclaimed himself to be god and the community‘s spiritual leader, which then had been accepted by his father and the inhabitants. Together with an armed group he menaced and terrorized other neighboring villages. When Chon witnessed his cousin kill various members of their own community, he escaped La Mora.

“Winner of the Emerging International Filmmaker Award. Born in Cambodia in 1981, Neary Adeline Hay sought refuge in France with her family and grew up in the suburbs of Paris. She discovered a passion for video at a young age and bought her first camcorder at 16. After studying art and later attending the Ecole Normale Supérieure des Arts Appliqués, she directed experimental films before traveling around the world with her camera.”