Daze of Justice by Michael Siv (review)

Michael Siv's documentary Daze of Justice enacts the practice of Asian American cultural memory by documenting the journey of Cambodian American Khmer Rouge survivors who return to Phnom Penh to serve as witnesses in the war crime tribunals. Overlaid with Siv's first-person narration, the film follows Marie Chea, Sophany Bay, and Sarem Neou, Cambodian American women who break their decades-long silence and attend the Extraordinary Chambers in the Court of Cambodia (ECCC)—a United Nations and Cambodian co-established court specifically for trying senior members of the Khmer Rouge for crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide committed during its brutal regime in the late 1970s—to testify on behalf of their murdered families and friends at the hands of the Khmer Rouge regime. Led by Dr. Leakhena Nou, an associate professor of sociology at California State University, Long Beach, and founder of the Applied Social Research Institute of Cambodia who works with the Cambodian diaspora in the United States to file grievances with the ECCC, the three women travel to Phnom Penh to participate as witnesses in Case 002. Using a road trip narrative, the film depicts how the subjects, including the 1.5-generation children of survivors and perpetrators, renegotiate their relationship to the trauma of genocide and grapple with active forgetting and the (im)possibilities of justice.

Daze of Justice begins with Nou's outreach work with the Cambodian American community in Southern California. Congregating with survivors beneath the shade of a willow tree in a Long Beach park, Nou asks for volunteers to speak about their experiences: "You guys are witnesses," Nou explains in Khmer. "Pardon me, but if you die, that's it. No one believes me because I didn't live through it. Do you want to address the atrocities?" The group falls silent in response as the camera pans across worried faces. "The silence is familiar to me and most of my generation," Siv narrates over the sound of wind blowing into the microphone. Remembering trauma can retraumatize, but the importance of remembering drives Nou to persist in her request for bravery from justifiably fearful people who have lived through hell. The recruitment drives continue at a community event at the Long Beach public library where Cambodian American survivors gather. "We are trying to help you find closure to this traumatic history," Nou announces to the group, "not by violence, not by hatred, not by anger but by using the legal mechanism as a way to educate the next generation." They find ways to begin recounting the unspeakable by drawing their lost loved ones and scenes from their memories. Afterward, once-reluctant survivors amble forward to the microphone and share their experiences of loss in an act of communal mourning. The bravery of those still here to commemorate those who are gone makes healing possible. The communal setting of collective memory sets the stage for Chea, Bay, and Neou, accompanied by Nou, Siv, and his digital camera, to embark on their journey to Cambodia to testify against the Khmer Rouge at the ECCC.

In Cambodia, they find little of what they sought through official channels. The scenes at the court chambers waiting room exhibit this "daze of justice," as they wait days on end for resolution when none seems forthcoming. Even the eventual sentencing illustrates how official courts are a means to write history, but repairing a community needs the creation and sharing of memories. Understanding this, Nou takes the survivors to meet with the son of Kang Kew Iew, "aka Duch," the first convicted war criminal and Khmer Rouge leader of the infamous S21 Tuol Sleng prison, where twenty thousand people were tortured and executed. Meeting Duch's son Hong Siu Pheng, who lives in the countryside with his family in poverty, makes evident that the suffering of the Khmer Rouge inflicted on Cambodia extends on all sides. When Nou explains their reparative mission to Pheng, Pheng retorts with an insecure smirk: "My father never acted directly from...