Belonging
It's April 1975 and the Khmer Rouge are marching on Phnom Penh. Just three days before the city falls, a small orphaned girl, Li-Da Men, is flown out of the country. Eventually, she ends up as the adopted daughter of the British cook and business woman, Prue Leith and her husband Rayne Kruger. Li-Da has a comfortable and privileged upbringing whilst the country of her birth is returned to Year Zero by the murderous Khmer Rouge, whose Killing Fields claim nearly two million Cambodians.
Now, twenty six years later, Li-Da returns to Cambodia in search of the truth: the truth about her past, the truth about her country's past and the truth about what is going on in that country today. This powerful film is the story of that search. A search which at every turn forces Li-Da to re-examine not just her past and opinions but also challenges the way in which the West regards Cambodia; a search which has the most astonishing and moving denouement. Within a week of Li-Da arriving in Cambodia, two families come forward believing they may be related to her. In the following weeks more people appear, often travelling long distances at their own expense: none searching for a rich Western relative, all searching for personal peace, having lost children and sisters during Cambodia's bloody war and its aftermath. Li-Da forms very strong bonds with some of these people - gradually realizing that it is irrelevant whether they are blood relatives or not, as she is bound to them by the much stronger bond of history. For this is a country which has little evidence of its past, so detail becomes less important while truth and belonging is what and where you perceive it to be.
In what is almost a miraculous turn of events, Li-Da does discover something of the truth about what happened to her natural parents but this is not the most important discovery of her quest. As she is drawn more and more into the lives and homes of ordinary Cambodian people, she forms a deep attachment to them and for one in particular. By the end of the film Li-Da Kruger returns to Britain a transformed person - in love with a Cambodian, committed to return to Cambodia and not at the end of a process, but at the beginning.
This is a film with a gripping personal narrative, with tears and triumph, with some humor as well as disappointment. And in the most painful and poignant way shows life in Cambodia today: how a country wrestles with the concepts of justice and truth in relation to its past and yet in the end offers hope and optimism for the future.
