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Run time:
54 min.
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Thailand, USA
On a sunny morning in 2004, in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, two men on a
motorbike pulled up at a newsstand. One of them stepped off, walked
over to Cambodia's most popular and influential labor leader, and
calmly shot him in the head and in the heart.
Director Bradley Cox arrived at the scene of the murder minutes
later, with his camera. For the next five years he filmed every
important development in the case. WHO KILLED CHEA VICHEA? takes us
from the dusty streets and slums of Phnom Penh to remote villages,
through courtrooms, brothels, factories and gambling dens.
Working with producer Rich Garella (a Providence native) he has
created an unprecedented film about the inner workings of one of the
world's most corrupt states.
By 2004, Cambodia was becoming one of the world's largest garment
exporters. Foreign-owned factories employed hundreds of thousands of
desperate young women who flooded in from the countryside. The
country quickly became dependent on garment exports. Its biggest
customer was, and is, the United States.
Vichea, the president of Cambodia's free trade union, slept on a mat
in the union office and didn't collect a salary. Despite beatings and
death threats, he rallied the workers as they fought for wage
increases, improved working conditions and an end to forced overtime,
and often won. He gained an international reputation in the labor
movement, and Cambodia gained a reputation as a model country for
worker's rights.
But inside Cambodia, the lesson of the Khmer Rouge regime, and of the
regimes before and after it, is well known. Ally oneself with power -
or face the consequences.
WHO KILLED CHEA VICHEA? is about the killing of one man and the slow
silencing of an entire nation. It is about how a small elite keeps an
iron grip on power through the use of its police, its army, its
manipulation of the courts and its most effective tool: fear. And it
is about how hope survives against incredible odds.
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