Sayon Soeun breaks a 25-year silence to reveal his abduction by Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge at age six, taking us behind the scenes with the children's army as a witness to genocide. Footage from a lost archive reveals a war-torn country closed to Western media during the 1970s. We follow Sayon to America to track his remarkable recovery and eventual redemption: helping children enjoy the kind of childhood that was stolen from him. A trip to Cambodia to search for family finds Sayon plagued by doubt, so he insists his possible siblings take DNA tests. The results provide a dramatic ending. "Once a child soldier" is an award-winning documentary of the seasonal competition of Montreal Independent Film Festival.
Janet Paxton Gardner is the producer, director and writer of award-winning documentaries on Vietnamese and Cambodian subjects as well as a notable film on the life of American Peter Cooper. In recognition of her work with the Gardner Documentary Group, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2015-2016. Her latest project is Quakers: The Quiet Revolutionaries.
Ms. Gardner began her career as a film editor, field producer and news writer for WNBC and WRC-TV. She also was a staff feature writer for the Cleveland Plain Dealer and contributor to major newspapers such as the New York Times and Boston Globe. She is an alumna of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and Cooper Union.
Comments