Lida Chan, a 30 year-old filmmaker from Cambodia, received a $5,000 award for her project “Noces rouges”

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

During the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea regime of the Khmer Rouge (1975-1979), 250,000 women were forced into state-planned marriages.

Today, Pen Sochan, 48, is a poor peasant woman. At 16, she was forced into marriage by the Khmer Rouge leaders in the village to which she had been deported. She tried to resist but the leaders ordered her husband to rape her. Since then, she has lived with the shame, confiding in no one.

Finally, Sochan decides to bring her case to the international tribunal set up to try the old Khmer Rouge leaders. But will telling her story bring her peace of mind? Will her testimony to the tribunal and her meetings with other victims give her hope and confidence that justice will be done?

“Noces rouges” is the story of a survivor who pits her humanity against an ideology and a system designed to annihilate people like her.