By David Pountain
Director: Robert H. Lieberman
In Robert H. Lieberman’s Angkor Awakens: A Portrait of Cambodia, history is a collective dream that weighs on the psyche of a nation’s people. Mixing mesmerising music with stunning footage of nature, striking images of violence and suffering, and intimate interviews about the past, present and future, the American documentary tells a broad story of recent Cambodian history on an individual level. In demonstrating a continuity between several contrasting periods of governance while analysing the personal and emotional effects of these national circumstances, Angkor Awakens stresses the importance of bringing these memories out into the open so that we may understand our present state and learn from the mistakes of the past – a sentiment that doesn’t seem to be solely directed at the Cambodian people either.
A film that can be roughly divided into three segments of unequal duration, Lieberman spends a good twenty-plus minutes setting the tone with a fragmented series of personal experiences before the story truly begins. Here, we see how the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979 maintain a haunting presence in modern day society, though interviews reveal how those who lived under this genocidal regime are often sadly reluctant to discuss this terrible period. The intense emotions that still lurk just below Cambodia’s often serene surface are illustrated poignantly in a scene in which a child breaks down crying as he is questioned on the death of his uncle, whose crime was merely to steal a fish head. Though the lingering footage of the sobbing boy comes hazardously close to exploitation, the scene’s redemptive profundity comes in the form of the child’s mother, who remains relatively stoic as she comforts her son, save for a single tear streaming down her cheek.
Once the film delves into the historical facts of the matter – illustrated with increasingly violent Khmer shadow theatre – Angkor Awakens develops an intriguing new layer of implicit commentary regarding Lieberman’s own nation. While the director refrains from making any direct allusions to the dire consequences of American intervention in the Middle East, the parallels are unmistakable as the film recounts how short-sighted French and American foreign policy in Cambodia and Vietnam helped awaken a sleeping giant. Without ever crossing the line into apologetics, Lieberman vividly evokes how the Khmer Rouge’s notions of self-sufficiency could appeal to such a nation, even if the reality of their governance was something horrifying, with the nightmare ironically ending only with the violent intervention of the Vietnamese army.
It is in the film’s final half hour, covering the political and psychological aftermath of these events up to the present day, that we begin to suspect that Lieberman may have stretched himself a little too thinly subject-wise, given the film’s compact 85-minute runtime. A slight extension may have granted Angkor Awakens the freedom to delve further into the meat of the issues in this final segment, or even allowed us the occasional section to simply soak in the individual moments and images without the consistent audio commentary, which can prove smothering over time.
That being said, this concluding stretch still serves in its own right as a bittersweet but ultimately optimistic depiction of Cambodia’s present state and possible future, placing brutal footage of modern day riots and anxious speculation on the population’s lingering paranoia and survivor’s guilt alongside vibrant protests that suggest a people ready to emerge from their period of ‘baskbat’ (broken courage) and take what they need. Between its US director and its predominantly English-language interview footage, Angkor Awakens: A Portrait of Cambodia is clearly a documentary directed more towards the west than the people of its country of focus. In this regard, the film hits its mark swimmingly, functioning as both a politically resonant cautionary tale of careless interventionism, and a concise but moving introduction to a nation, its tumultuous history and the causal factors behind its national identity.
Angkor Awakens screens in US cinemas from May 5th. Find more info here.
Robert H. Lieberman’s three earlier films They Call It Myanmar, Last Stop Kew Gardens and Green Lights are all available to watch on FilmDoo.