Michael Siv retraces steps to Cambodia

By Meredith May 
Updated, Friday, March 15, 2013 
The San Francisco Chronicle

Screen shot of Michael Siv's documentary about returning to Cambodia for the Khmer Rouge tribunals. Photo: Michael Siv

Michael Siv, who grew up in S.F., works on his documentary outside a temple in Cambodia.

Although he was too young to remember the "killing fields" of Cambodia, its ghosts have haunted filmmaker Michael Siv all his life. 

The genocide is the reason his family split apart in 1976. It's the reason he and his mother escaped to San Francisco when he was 5. And it's the one topic she refuses to talk about.

From 1975 to 1979, the Khmer Rouge murdered an estimated 1.7 million people in a fanatical attempt to rid the country of intellectuals, religious leaders and the wealthy and return to an agrarian society. Vietnamese soldiers eventually removed them from power.

That period in history is the silent subtext in the Cambodian community where Siv grew up in the Tenderloin with other refugees. He and his mother wouldn't discover until Siv was 14 that his father and a brother had survived and were still alive in Phnom Penh.

"Our parents don't want to talk about it, but the second generation is also traumatized by their silence," said Siv, whose journey back to Cambodia to re-meet his father was part of the 2001 independent film "Refugee."

Now Siv, 36, is making his own documentary about his homeland, "Wounds We Carry."

With seed money from the Center for Asian American Media in San Francisco, Siv traveled to Cambodia in 2011 with four genocide survivors from the United States for the United Nations-backed tribunal of four Khmer Rouge leaders.

He turned on his camera to walk with the survivors through the former killing fields, to pray at temples devoted to the victims, and to tour Pol Pot's infamous secret torture prison, Tuol Sleng, where an estimated 17,000 prisoners were killed.

Siv's guide was medical sociologist Leakhena Nou, an assistant professor at California State University Long Beach, who has traversed the United States since 2008 to collect and deliver 174 survivor testimonies to the tribunal in an ongoing effort to convict the Khmer Rouge defendants and restore justice to their victims.

"I felt it was a human rights violation to ignore the overseas survivors," she said.

One of those testimonies came from Sophany Bay, 67, of San Jose, who appears in Siv's film telling her story about losing her son, 5, and daughter, 6, to starvation while she was on the run in the rainy season in Cambodia, hiding under mango trees.

Left with just her 6-month-old girl, who was dangerously sick, she approached a Khmer Rouge soldier whom she had been led to believe was a nurse. He injected something into her baby's head, Bay said, and the girl died instantly.

"It was hard for me to go back, but I think this film is really important," she told The Chronicle. "We want to show the world what is going on in Cambodia, and what the Khmer Rouge did to us."

Gripping footage

Some of the most gripping footage comes from the group's visit to the country highlands, where Nou tracks down the 33-year-old son of Kaing Guek Eav, the Tuol Sleng prison chief known as "Duch" and the first to be convicted of war crimes, in 2010. (He is serving a 19-year prison term.)

The son, who had lived his life in hiding and had never seen Tuol Sleng prison, knew little of his father's past, Siv said.

But he was curious about the tribunal, and agreed to go with the film crew to tour the prison, which is now a museum and shrine to the dead.

Film viewers can discover in real time, along with Duch's son, the extent of his father's atrocities, as he sees for the first time photos of dead prisoners, beaten and shackled to their beds.

"I'm feeling nervous," he whispers on camera. "Shocked."

It was a powerful moment for Siv, as well, who felt a mixture of sympathy and anger at this man whose family was responsible for so much of his own family's suffering.

'We're both affected'

"But as I got to know him, I couldn't help but think he's no different than I am," Siv said. "We are about the same age. We were both born when all of this was happening, but we don't really know the history. We're both affected, and we're both trying to find out what happened."

In one scene, the son writes on a prison wall set aside for memorials to the victims: "I love you as much as I love my life. I am the son of Kaing Guek Eav."

Siv is editing his film now from his home in Daly City, and drumming up more funds to finish through social media and sneak previews at restaurants and Cambodian nonprofits.

Nou and Siv hope the film becomes a catalyst for Cambodians to heal. Siv would like his film to crack the code of silence in Cambodian families like his.

"Maybe I'll be able to ask my mom if she is OK about what happened," he said. "If she can move on. If she even wants to talk to me about it."

Preview the film at www.woundswecarry.com.

Meredith May is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: mmay@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @meredithmaysf