Unlike most documentaries that paint a grim picture of Cambodia in the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge, Stanley Harper's Cambodia Dreams tells an uplifting story of reunification and reconciliation in a family torn apart for 12 years.
It was not an easy film to make. Harper (right), spent 18 years chronicling the parallel lives of Yan Chheing and her family living in a refugee camp on the Thai border, and that of her daughter, Tha, who was left behind in a Cambodian village.
Harper filmed Yan and Tha without telling them about each other. 'I never told Yan Chheing we were filming with her daughter as it would have ruined the story,' says the Phnom Penh-based New Zealander.
'This is a documentary; it has to record the truth. I set up situations that were going to happen one day with or without me. We interpreted what happened into a cinematographic language as the story unfolded before us. I never knew the outcome.'
The film, completed in April last year, has been critically acclaimed abroad and domestically. It received rave reviews in the British and American press, and Harper was granted honorary citizenship by Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen and received letters of gratitude from King Sihamoni and his father, Sihanouk, after it was shown on national television in Cambodia.
Despite funding crises and gruelling filming conditions - the heat and dust were compounded by long spells without electricity - Harper and his crew of seven persisted, hoping not just to make a 'technically perfect film', but also wanting to follow the characters that captivated them.
Unlike others who resigned themselves to life in the refugee camps, Yan was desperate to leave. 'She was an amazing woman. She didn't want to be in the camp, she didn't want to go to live in a third country - she wanted to go home where she belonged,' says 55-year-old Harper, who met Yan and her family in a refugee camp while filming a documentary for the BBC in 1986.
