Frames of Memory: Mnemoculture in Human Rights Films on Cambodia and Vietnam

Human Rights campaigns and dissemination require a medium of expression to tell stories of torture, marginalization, abuse, trauma, death and dehumanization. At the core of these issues lie our fundamental understanding of ‘what is human’ or the ‘human condition’. Whether it be literature or visual cultural texts, there has always been representation of experiences of individuals and communities to highlight political and economic crisis, especially of those conflict zones which had been devastated by war leading to mass exodus. One of the attempts at dissemination of Human Rights has been the Human Rights Cinema and their screenings at various Human Rights Watch International Film Festivals. The paper proposes to analyze visual narratives of human stories of two nations, Vietnam and Cambodia in the context of their politico-historical trajectories. The primary films considered are First They Killed My Father (Cambodia) and Boat People (Vietnam). The first one is an adaptation of a survivor’s memoir showcasing HR violations under the rule of Khmer Rouge in Cambodia; while the latter depicts the mobility of people from Vietnam to escape threats to life after the fall of Saigon. The survivors tell their stories of HR violations, migration, identity formation, belongingness and trauma which serve as sites of memory and deliver new insights on war and how it enters domestic spaces.