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Rob Lemkin is an award-winning filmmaker and founder of Old Street Films. His past documentaries have dealt with political issues around the world, but most notably in South East Asia - and his latest work, Enemies of the People, continues on this theme. In a film that is both gripping and revelatory, Lemkin paired up with Thet Sambath, a senior journalist at the Phnom Phen Post in Cambodia, to finally get to the bottom of the atrocities that took place at the hands of Khmer Rouge. Laura Thornley at DFG caught up with the filmmaker to find out how you even begin to make a film that deals with the confessions of a nation's mass murderers...

Enemies of the People opens on International Human Rights Day, 10th December. There will be a special Q&A at the ICA in London on this day - find out more here.

Can you tell me how the directing relationship between yourself and Sambath came about?

I met Sambath first when I was going [to Cambodia] to do my own film and he was my fixer. I realised that I could not do my own film about the Khmer Rouge trial because I didn’t really have a way into the story. He told me he had been doing this project on his own. This was back in September 2006. He had literally just started filming to document his conversations rather than actually making a film; he is not really a filmmaker, he’s a journalist. When we eventually decided we were going to make a film together, the way that we worked was - I was in Britain, I would go over to Cambodia but only really for ten day periods and we would film some scenes and then I would come back. Like I say he’s not really a filmmaker, so I had to train him a little bit. I gave him a camera… so that the quality was just that much better. [For training] we only had half a day to show [him how] to shoot a scene so it can be cut and so on. I did this so that when I wasn’t there he could cover the stuff that might happen. Then we got into the network of killers. This is where the kind of meat of the film happens; although Brother Number Two is the sort of journalistic heart of the film, really the filmic part is these other characters.  When we got into that we kind of evolved things together. It was very much that we brought different skills to the project and we kind of complimented each other - we compliment, because the project is still ongoing in many, many ways.

Stylistically the film is very quiet, unaggressive despite the subject matter, can you tell me why you approached the film in this way?

The pace of the film, the way it’s kind of slow and the landscape is very brooding and has a strong presence; this all comes from the reality and my perception… of being with these people. You know everything does happen very slowly and everything happens in a very deliberate way. [The story of] the girl who grabs Khoun’s knee and sort of pleads for her life before she gets pushed down into the ditch; this is a story that sits with him everyday, it doesn’t ever go away. It’s a very slow long term thing that is going on and I think the film was really trying to get at a presentation of this kind of violence, in this extremely unsensational way.

The film is really personal to Sambath, not just because of family but also because he plays a lead role within the work. Why did you choose to make the film so personal?

My feeling was that we should make a universal film that would appeal, not only to Cambodians, but also to people all over the world… people of different generations, even much younger people who maybe have not heard of Communism, never mind Pol Pot and the Killing Fields. If we were going to do a film that had that kind of timeless appeal, then we would need to do it through [Sambath] because he is the guy who had his whole childhood world destroyed. The film is a way for him to kind of reconstitute his life through research and investigation. I think that makes the scenes of the film and the actual details of the killing fields have a much wider relevance. I hope in the future it will have a much wider use… in thinking about how to deal with this kind of human atrocity. I hope we have managed to get a sense that… it’s not just history for history’s sake. It’s actually an attempt to make an accommodation with history in order to be able to face the future. And I think again, that’s an eternal thing and you couldn’t do that if you did not have Sambath as a lens.

It’s quite an incredible amount of time to invest in a project, considering you perhaps couldn’t guarantee the outcome - for instance the confessions?

No, not really: we didn’t approach the film in that way. Well certainly when Sambath started he was trying to find out what he could understand: who are the Khmer Rouge? What did they really do? What can they tell me about what they did? [Then he could] join that up with what happened to him. When I came on board he was already quite advanced. There were refinements and there were further details that we got for the story. And of course there are other people we found who did make confessions that were live on camera. There is one guy who says at the beginning of the scene that he didn’t kill anyone. At the end of the scene he says, actually I killed one person. And now that guy is admitting to killing more people. So I would say from the point of view of the film that we were fairly assured that we were going to be able to get… inside, confessional accounts of the Killing Fields. We kind of knew that, but we didn’t know really how all of the story lines would work together.

Many of your other films take Asian Politics as the theme – can you explain how you approach these films being a British man – an outside to these cultures? The approach feels quite different to Enemies of the People.

Yeah they are, well The Undeclared War is not particularly different, although the technique is different - that was a narrated film. Ben Kingsley was the narrator and it was a bit more of a conventional BBC film. I’m interested in Asia, my wife is from a Burmese family, she was brought here but her family is connected to Burma. So our children have a South East Asian history and we have been on holiday to Burma and we see relatives. And so there is a general connection to that part of the world in my family life and personal life as well. I feel that I am interested in the strong stereotypes [from this region] of maybe evil or monstrosity and trying to get behind that to see what… the reality is. I think I am always interested in demystifying of horror, trying to get behind the sort of sensational presentation of these things. And that certainly was the case in The Undeclared War.

I have made films all over the world to be honest, not much in South America, but quite a few in Africa and quite a few in Europe, as well as Asia. It looks like I have focussed unduly on Asia, but I am interested. I’m certainly interested in that fact that since the Cold War period, World War II onwards [this region] had such a contested history, with so many different futures being imagined by people. I think that kind of tension is something I am very interested in.

Can you tell me about how Enemies of the People has been received in Cambodia?

I went to the premiere in Pnom Phen in July. It was a very low-key premiere because the government refused to allow it to be shown. The biggest cinema in Pnom Phen, the Lux cinema, were saying, “we could run this for a month and we could do pretty well and we will get 700 people in a night”. But they couldn’t do it without a licence from the Government. We showed it in a Goethe Institute backed cinema run by a German filmmaker. [This means that] quite a small number of Cambodians in Cambodia are getting to see it. The [Government’s] reasoning…[is that] they do not want Brother Number Two to be given any airtime. The problem in Cambodia is, of course, that the government is run by people who were in the Khmer Rouge, they just happened to be on the other side of Nuon Chea. When he is talking about the conflict in the Khmer Rouge that… caused the ordering of killings, actually that is a conflict they know all about because they were part of it. They don’t want him to be seen on a big screen talking about it because as horrific as it may seem there is a certain ethnic and nationalistic appeal that the Khmer Rouge make to Cambodians and that is still quite durable really. In a way one of the most remarkable things about Sambath’s work is that it’s the first time that a Cambodian has presented an account of history in this way. Its been largely written by Americans, French, British, Australians – foreigners really.  And this [film] is pretty authoritative. So this is something that will have a lot of resonance with Cambodians and the Government are a bit jittery about it because of that.

That must present certain dangers for Sambath?

There have been some incidents since Sundance. He was run off the road by two cars at night on either side of him. I think that by and large the raising of his profile is a good thing in terms of security. And I think certainly more and more people in the government, and people who are in the authorities and the legal profession [in Cambodia] are realising that this is work that needs to be done and it’s not being done with the attempt to ruin anybody’s career, it’s actually being done for something more profound than that. It is being done so the whole of society can have a resource so they can really understand what happened in this completely dark and mysterious period.

Enemies of the People is released in the UK, starting in London, on 10th December through Dogwoof Pictures. For more details see the Dogwoof website.

Want more? Then read Laura's review of the film.

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