Profile | She found a fun angle on Khmer Rouge genocide. Cambodian filmmaker Ines Sothea on her debut short film, and future plans

Ines Sothea was told how lucky she was not to have been born under the Khmer Rouge. She delved into how people survived the regime and learned kids had had fun

Fresh from being awarded US$38,400 at a Macau workshop, she tells the Post she is working on another film about the Khmer Rouge, and two feature films

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Filmmaker Ines Sothea in Nepal, where she is working on a co-produced feature film. One of eight winners of funding at a recent film workshop in Macau, Ines Sothea has been used to self-funding her short films, which include Rice, about children under the Khmer Rouge. Photo: Deepenedra Gauchan

Stephen McCarty

Published: 7:15am, 4 Jun 2024

Unless you’re some sort of vile perpetrator, it is difficult to conceive of having fun during a genocide.

Nevertheless, some innocents, perhaps too young to appreciate the horror, managed to do so despite Cambodia’s barbaric Khmer Rouge dictatorship of 1975 to 1979, which resulted in the deaths of an estimated 2 million or more people.

They were the subject of the short film Rice (2014), by Cambodian filmmaker Ines Sothea, which pits the naivety of youth against the Khmer Rouge’s brutality.

Ines Sothea says few modern Cambodian television or cinema productions concern themselves with this appalling chapter of the country’s history.

It’s a tragic history, but when I heard stories of what the children did, it gave me an idea: why not tell it from their perspective?

Ines Sothea on her debut short film, Rice

So why did she make a film about a gang of five hungry countryside children, who scrabble in the dirt to steal and then cook precious grains of rice fallen from hessian sacks?