The U.S. Embassy will celebrate the 60th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Cambodia with a public screening of the film “New Year Baby” with the director and producer Socheata Poeuv at the Chenla theatre.

Date: Monday, 19 July 2010
Time: 19:00 – 21:00
Location: Chenla Theatre

The event is free but you will need a ticket to enter. Information about how to get the ticket will be available later.
New Year Baby: film documentary by Socheata Poeuv
Story synopsis
What does it take to heal?
My father pruned our trees in a sarong with a kitchen cleaver. My mother stored stinky fermented fish under the sink. My parents made us go to Buddhist temple on Saturdays and Bible study on Sundays. In some ways, they never left Cambodia though we lived in Dallas, Texas. While I thought everything about my parents was “old country,” they were desperately trying to forget their past. They are survivors of teh Khmer Rouge genocide. In fact my whole family is, and it’s something they almost never talk about.
http://newyearbaby.net/

Other 60th anniversary events, click this link http://cambodia.usembassy.gov/60_anniversary.html

More about Socheata Poeuv on The New York Times
27, Khmer Legacies, New Haven

Poeuv was born in a Thai refugee camp to Cambodian parents who fled the Khmer Rouge. She was 22 when her parents revealed that the two women she thought were her older sisters were in fact her mother’s sister’s daughters, orphaned by Pol Pot’s regime. She also discovered that her older brother was her half brother — a surviving child from her mother’s murdered first husband. Her curiosity about her parents’ long silence led her to make a film about her personal history, called ‘‘New Year Baby.’’ She has now started ‘‘Khmer Legacies,’’ a project in which children interview their parents about surviving the Cambodian genocide and which she hopes will result in 10,000 videotaped testimonials. ‘‘You’ve got to change the silence that surrounds this, and the way that Cambodian parents talk to their children and children talk to their parents. There really is a threat of this culture being completely invisible if people don’t step forward to remember and distinguish it.’’