Film
Red Wedding
Red Wedding is a 2012 documentary by Lida Chan and Guillaume Suon about forced marriage under the Khmer Rouge. Chan is Cambodian and Suon is French-Cambodian. It follows Sochan Pen, who was made to marry a Khmer Rouge soldier at 16, as she seeks answers 30 years later.[1][2] It won the mid-length documentary award at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) in 2012.[1][3]
Story
From 1975 to 1979 the Khmer Rouge pushed to grow the population, and at least 250,000 young women were married to soldiers they had never met.[1][4] Sochan Pen was one of them. Her husband abused her, and she escaped.[4] After three decades of silence she decides to bring a complaint to the Khmer Rouge tribunal, and she questions people who carried out the regime's orders in her district. They deny knowing anything.[1][5] The film mixes her story with footage and songs from the Khmer Rouge years, including a radio broadcast in which Pol Pot calls for 20 million Cambodians. It closes with her daughter's wedding.[5]
Production
Bophana Production, the Bophana Center and Tipasa Production produced the film, with support from the Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program, the IDFA Fund and the Cambodia Film Commission, among others.[2] Lida Chan joined the Bophana Center in 2006 as an archivist working on Khmer Rouge records, and took part in a documentary workshop led by Rithy Panh in 2010.[1] The Bophana Center counts the film among the documentaries made by young Cambodians it trained.[3]
Screenings and awards
After IDFA, the film won the WorldView Award at the Geneva Human Rights Film Festival. It also took the Golden Award in the mid-length competition of the Al Jazeera International Documentary Film Festival and a jury award at the Gdansk DocFilm Festival.[1] It was screened at DocHouse in London in February 2013, at the Lincoln Center in New York and at the Cambodia International Film Festival.[4][2][1]
Reviewing the film in Pacific Affairs, the scholar Sophal Ear wrote that Sochan's story is typical of the women married off to strangers, and that her questions to former cadres meet only denials.[5]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 Women Make Movies, Red Wedding: Women Under the Khmer Rouge (undated)
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Bophana Center, Red Wedding (undated)
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Bophana Center, Production (undated)
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Bertha DocHouse, Red Wedding (December 10, 2020)
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 Sophal Ear, "Red Wedding: Women Under the Khmer Rouge", Pacific Affairs (March 23, 2018)