Who Killed Chea Vichea? is an investigative masterpiece. The film's director, Bradley Cox, and his producers Rich Garella and Jeffrey Saunders are to be thanked and congratulated for this arresting documentary. They have let the rest of the world in on what all Cambodians already know: namely, that their lives under the Hun Sen government, though no longer the disaster of the Khmer Rouge years from 1975 to 1979 nor the calamity of the civil war years that followed through the 1980s to 1993, are still caught up in a terrifying existence in which might makes right. The full-time nightmares of the killing fields past have lessened to become more occasional, more contextualized. They are limited to situations where power is challenged, or is felt to be so. But they are no less horrifying and brutal for all this. Those deemed in the way will pay. One former hit man, interviewed in shadow, says many Cambodian corpses have already been fed to the crocodiles. Not just ten or even fifty. Many more!

One comes away from this film understanding that the killer of the much loved Cambodian labor union president Chea Vichea on January 22nd, 2004, Chinese New Years, in front of a news stand near his home in Phnom Penh, has never been brought to justice. In fact, the courts, in a compounding act of injustice , falsely convicted two innocent men of the crime. What makes this film work is its convincing presentation of the background of these two events: Chea Vichea's assassination in broad daylight and the trial and subsequent appeals of the two convenient scapegoats, Born Samnang and Sok Sam Ouen. Director Cox spent five years in Cambodia and had already been interviewing Chea Vichea in the period leading up to the 2003 elections. He knew of his staunch commitment to workers' rights in Cambodia and also of the threats to Vichea's life resulting from his fight for those rights. Vichea had opted to stay in Cambodia and support its 200,000 garment workers, whose wages were only around US$45 a month, in their demands for better pay and working conditions rather than flee. He had allied with the opposition leader Sam Rainsy against Hun Sen and the ruling Cambodia Peoples Party, CPP. In the July 2003 national election, no side had gotten a majority and the three leading parties, CPP, Sam Rainsy, and the Royalists, spent months bargaining over how to form a coalition government. Eventually the Royalists sided with the CPP, and Sam Rainsy lost out. Then came Chea Vichea's killing.

  

 

Directed by Robert Lemelson. 2010. 38 minutes. 
In English and Indonesian with English subtitles. 

Reviewed by Robert McKinley. 

The title of Family Victim: The "Bad Coconut" of a Javanese Family draws on a Javanese proverb that says there is "a bad coconut in every bunch" or as the related Balinese proverb would have it "not all coconuts from the same tree have milk." This film shows with amazing sensitivity the complexities of a deviant personality within the strongly cooperative bonds of a large Javanese family. The one who is poorly adjusted, named Estu, has taken resources from his parents and siblings to support his gambling habit, he has often broken the possessions of others in destructive rages, and he has even threatened to kill his brother or his wife and their children through sorcery. Yet he feels that he is the one being misunderstood. He is the one not being listened to by his parents and siblings. He tries to tell them of his true feelings and anger by writing graffiti on the inside walls of his house and shop. The title "Family Victim" stems from one particular outburst. Despite the trouble he keeps causing his family, he is the victim! He explains that he has taken on all their misfortunes and they have taken on all his potential successes for themselves. So in his eyes he is a true family victim. On another wall he says he will get revenge. In tears his own sister tells of their mother having been driven to pray to God asking him to "please take Estu back," for they have done all they can to take care of him. Somehow they have failed and can do no more. From where has all this pain and bitterness come?

That is the question director Robert Lemelson and his two Javanese colleagues. Dr. Mahar Agusno and his wife Dr. Ninik Supartini , a psychiatrist and a psychologist respectively, try to answer in this film. Estu is in fact Ninik's own brother. He had been included in a sample of poorly adjusted individuals Agusno and Supartini had been studying in central Java, Indonesia. Their joint research with anthropologist Lemelson is on culture and mental illness. Their intimate acquaintance with this case and their mutual sensitivity with regard to Estu and his family members makes for an exceptionally revealing account. It is frank, deeply well informed, and carried out over many years so as to have the effect of being an in depth longitudinal study. We get to see what can happen over time and in unforeseen ways in such difficult relationships as these.

 

 

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This is a realistic film about the serious problem of transportation congestion in Mumbai, one of the world's most populated cities. It is humanistic in its respect for the people it features and is also humorous at times about the unique and sometimes conflicting conjunctions that this complex transportation problem inflicts on variously positioned residents. The film presents many dimensions of the transportation problem through non-scripted portrayals of key actors as they debate plans and implement projects to alleviate traffic congestion in and around the main commercial hub of the city.

The main characters in the film are a bureaucrat of a government public sector transportation department, a citizen activist and her colleagues, and a street vendor and his family. The film chronicles their lives as they evaluate the planning and construction of the highway links proposed to alleviate vehicle congestion. The film convincingly shows how a sea bridge and flyover become infrastructure center points around which the city's citizens converge. The film also conveys the individual and institutional struggles involved in building large scale infrastructure to meet the burgeoning desires of a large population, while showing the inevitable conflicts and differences of opinion that arise in the process.  

 

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