How would you take it if you found out that the sisters you’d grown up with weren’t really your sisters? What would you do if you first heard of your father’s heroics in smuggling your family out of a genocide-ravaged country decades after the fact? Possible outcomes – Open the yellow pages and let your fingers do the walking to the closest counseling center. Suck it up, stash those feelings in your personal vault and throw away the key. Or make a movie that can get people (especially Americans) to “give a damn” about the larger world, while mending the wounds for countless others who are living the same nightmare. For one extraordinary individual, the latter was the only way home. Meet Change Agent Socheata Poeuv, the first responder for a generation of children survivors of Cambodia’s darkest moment – the Killing Fields.



Standing 5’ 2” and armed with a grace and humility that disarms, Socheata has an uncanny knack for getting things done - the hard way, if that’s what it takes. Case in point: her first film, New Year Baby, started as a “glorified home video” (her description) and ended as an award-winning documentary. To get there, Socheata convinced over 250 individuals to put cash on the table to keep the movie in production and steer clear of the financial purgatory of credit card debt or worse. In fact, her producer - a Yale grad student - threw in his tuition money to front a limited theatrical release so the film could be considered for an Academy Award (sadly, it was not short-listed).



Why are so many people forking over time and money to help this Change Agent filmmaker? Socheata gives credit to the film itself. On the official Web site, she writes: “New Year Baby is my personal documentary - a search for the truth about how my family survived the Khmer Rouge genocide and why they buried the truth for so long.”

You see, Socheata’s parents hid their story of how they made it through the Killing Fields from her for 25 years. According to Socheata, their silence is mirrored by Cambodian society at large. Call it the Cambodian version of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Survivors don’t tell their stories. Most children don’t ask. The genocide is conspicuously absent from schoolbooks. Ex-Khmer Rouge officials still infiltrate the government. Even the masterminds of the massacre spent the past two-and-a-half decades in peaceful retirement in the Cambodian countryside. You get the picture.



But Change Agents don’t sit idle. Socheata has stepped up. And Khmer Legacies is her answer.

She’s rounding up friends, some 50 plus and counting, to help get her newly-formed organization, Khmer Legacies, up and running. Placing a bet that other children of survivors must feel the same way, Socheata plans to document as many survival stories as she can by tapping into the tenacity of the new generation of Cambodians. If Steven Spielberg can do it for Holocaust survivors through the Shoah Institute, Socheata figures she can do the same – albeit without the riches of the world’s most successful movie director. Instead, she musters the scrappiness that has earned her status as an Echoing Green social entrepreneur. In case you didn’t catch it the first time, Socheata has an uncanny knack for getting things done!



With New Year Baby under her belt, all cylinders of Khmer Legacies are firing and her pilot project is well underway. Socheata is tracking down young Cambodian Americans in the Bronx and sending them home with videographers to ask their parents one simple question – what the hell happened? While building the Khmer Legacies story archive one-by-one, she is forging new cross-generational ties within Cambodian families. Work has started in the U.S. and she’s already strategizing about bringing the project to Cambodia in the next few years.

Any Change Agent worth their weight in karma knows you need to connect the dots to be relevant. She’s showing Americans the link between the Cambodian genocide and other massive atrocities, including the current situation in Darfur which is on everyone’s mind (right?!). For her, film is a “powerful vehicle” that can get
people to pay attention to the world around them. She figures spotlighting survivor stories sparks urgency and immediacy that builds compassion for victims and fuels grassroots movements to address genocide today.



Over the past year, Socheata spent a third of her time on the road screening her film at various festivals – from Holland and Ireland to Israel and Cambodia, with plenty of stops across the U.S. in between. New Year Baby, Socheata says, changed her parents’ relationship to their past. Now they are applauded at screenings. Today she’s set on extending that powerful sense of reconciliation to Cambodian “parents” and their children all over the world. Awesome!






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