3rd November: Theary Seng will be meeting the [Rome Int'l Film] Festival's audiences

At Festival the lawyer who survived genocide

Theary Seng

Tomorrow, 3rd November, the International Rome Film Festival will be having as a guest Theary Seng, the Cambodian lawyer who at the end of the Seventies, still a child, underwent with her family violence from the Red Khmer. Theary Seng, American of adoption, will be present at the screening of the documentary Facing Genocide: Khieu Samphan and Pol Pot, by directors David Aronowitsch and Staffan Lindberg (in competition at the Festival within the Extra section coordinated by Mario Sesti). In Aronowitsch and Lindberg's film, the lawyer is the antagonist of Khieu Samphan, the main character of the story, back then Head of State under Pol Pot's regime, of which he still declares to be nostalgic.

After the screening, Theary Seng, current legal point of reference for victims of the Red Khmer's dictatorship, will be meeting the audiences.

The meeting is scheduled for 3rd November, at 10:30 p.m., at the Teatro Studio dell’Auditorium.

Theary Seng's short biography:

At the age of five, Theary was captured together with her mother and brothers (her father had already been killed), by Pol Pot's Red Khmer, and imprisoned most likely in the sadly well-known S-21 Torture Center. During her confinement, she also lost her mother who was taken in her sleep by Pol Pot's followers and brutally killed in the rice fields near the prison, the terrible renowned Cambodian “Killing Fields”.

Theary survived the genocide and went to the U.S.A. with her remaining relatives. Here, a little over twenty years old, she started studying law and she graduated as a lawyer. Theary Seng has been living in Cambodia for a couple of years now, where she is busy carrying out lawsuits in a criminal court together with other victims who were made orphans by the regime. She is also involved in helping these victims lodge complaints against the Red Khmer's leaders who are still alive: Khieu Samphan, Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary and Ieng Thirith.

The Film

Facing Genocide: Khieu Samphan and Pol Pot

by David Aronowitsch, Staffan Lindberg, Sweden - Norway, 2010, 94’

Journey in the life (and mind) of Khieu Samphan, Head of State of democratic Kampuchea during the bloody regime of the Red Khmer. The film shows Khieu – with whom the directors spent almost 18 months – before being arrested and trialed for crimes against humanity, as he tells his personal story as well as that of the regime. He reveals a clear psychological scheme behind the savagery, and especially a disarming indifference towards the events. An authentic and admirable lesson of the “banality of evil”: any attempt to make the protagonist become aware of the horror of which he was accomplice, is totally vain. Pol Pot, for the first time, shows up here and there in the disquieting and spectral repertory