New Year Baby

Director Socheata Poeuv was born on the Cambodian New Year in a Thai refugee camp. Her family ultimately survived the genocide under Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge and settled in the United States. When the family gathers for a holiday, her parents reveal the secret they have kept hidden from her for 25 years: her two elder sisters are actually adopted cousins and her elder brother comes from her mother's previous marriage. The young filmmaker is shocked. What other secrets do her parents have in store for her? When she goes back to Cambodia with her parents and brother for the first time, she uses this documentary as a way to get her otherwise reticent parents talking, and it works. What follows is a gripping and moving succession of meetings in which the different family members directly confront their atrocious past, which unravels step by step. Archive footage and animated fragments add a meaningful frame of reference to this film, in which the director openly expresses herself in her voice-over about her parents and herself. She interlaces this with interviews with her sisters, who never want to go back to Cambodia. Through this personal story, the film visualises one of the most abhorrent periods in history, but at the same time is a tribute to a loving family. (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)