And some of your subjects are still in jail now too.
Tep Vanny is serving a two-year prison sentence at the moment on what are widely held to be politically motivated charges. She's actually the subject of a global Amnesty International campaign called Stand Up For The Brave. We are trying to use the film as an advocacy tool to try and secure her release. There's an online petition that people can sign on the Amnesty website soon. You can write to Hun Sen and ask for her to be released.
With the events that transpired in Myanmar after the return of Aung San Suu Kyi and how her reforms never got started and now she's being widely criticised for human rights abuses in the country. If the ruling party was ousted in Cambodia would it be the case of more of the same. Is systemic corruption ever going to go away there?
I don't know. It's so hard to speculate on things like that. Certainly there's an appetite for change within the population. People are fed up with the corruption. But the government is so bloated and so built on a system of corruption that it would have an almost catastrophic affect on daily life and on the civil service if the opposition did take power. Things would have to be changed so fundamentally that it could be a very traumatic experience for the country. I don't know how corrupt the opposition are, but at least they could have an opportunity to prove themselves, or should be allowed an opportunity to be voted for and to have a free and fair election. And then whether they turn out to be corrupt that's politics. That's kind of what we get at in the film. The film is structured in such a way that it is meant to resonate universal truths. It's not so much that these things are happening in Cambodia, but that they could just as much be as relevant to things that are going on here. It's more about the ideas of the corrupting nature of power and the role of unaccountable institutions and how they are no accountable to the people themselves. And the uneasy relationship between church and state. These kind of things are themes that we can all resonate with here. The corruption is here and it's in the UK and it's across Europe. It's just slightly more sophisticated. And it's called a different name. And in that way it's harder to see and so harder to deal with. In South East Asia the corruption is so blatant that you can see very clearly what it is and it is easier to deal with it and to try and understand it and try to respond to it. Whereas here it's more obfuscated and it's more subtle and more insidious. It's kind of hidden under these veneers of various different labels like for example the recent deal that the Tory government in the UK signed with the DUP in Northern Ireland to prop up a faltering government. That's a multi-million pound bribe in anybody's language. And it spits in the face of all of the people who were murdered on both sides during the troubles. It's an absolute sham.
That issue of land and an occupying force is one the definitely resonates worldwide.
There's a case currently at the International Criminal Court where they are considering a case against Hun Sen for committing crimes against humanity. Or there's about to be a case where they say that the systematic land-grabs that are happening in Cambodia are a crime against humanity and that would be a landmark case. It is such a catastrophic thing for land to be taken like that. In the city what you have is that a lot of the people who being evicted are people who are living in informal urban settlements or slums but the makeup of those communities is very different. It's very varies. You've got doctors and nurses and teachers and people working in the military. You have got people who are drivers as well, all different levels of society you have living in these areas. Some people have large businesses and run hotels and guesthouses, and they own the property. And then other people are just renting and they are just transient workers coming into the city to find work. So when you forcibly evict these people out to the outskirts where they can't farm. They are in these no-man's lands where there is no education, there's no opportunity for work, there's no hospital or health care, or anything like that. And this is where they get relocated to. So inevitably they leave the relocation sites and trickle back into the city and move into another informal settlement that's at risk of forced eviction. You have this endless cycle of people moving. These waves of people coming in to the city, living in these very fragile environments, and then being forced out. It's a totally unsustainable model for how any kind of city or culture or society should be built.
30 CinÉireann / May 2018