Pre-Release Screening of the documentary film, THREADS: KOSAL’S REEL
Jointly sponsored by Yale University’s
Council on Southeast Asia Studies
Genocide Studies Program, and the Center for Khmer Studies
FREE ADMISSION
1:30 P.M.
Doors Open (opportunity to informally meet the filmmaker, members of the
Crew, and Kosal (the film’s protagonist) and her daughter (Nisa)
1:45 P.M.
Welcome & Introduction by Dr. Ben Kiernan and Dr. Eve Zucker
2:00 to 3:45 P.M.
Screening
3:45 to 3:55 P.M.
10-minute break
3:55 to 4:45 P.M.
Q & A, Discussion with the filmmaker, crew, the protagonist (Kosal N.), & her daughter, Nisa (born in Cambodia in the midst of the KR genocide)
Followed by beverages, light refreshments, & dragon fruit in lobby
For further information, please contact: seas@yale.edu
Synopsis: In Threads: Kosal’s Reel, the moving life story of Kosal N., a survivor of the Khmer Rouge genocide, is interwoven with that of her volunteer English teacher (Shanee, the filmmaker), a Jewish American woman from Boston, who first met Kosal as a newly arrived refugee in San Francisco in 1986. Kosal later relocated to southern California, where she raised her four children as a single parent while working two jobs — one as a seamstress, the other at a donut-shop counter. Using vivid footage shot in Cambodia and California over the course of nearly twenty-five years, and supported by a riveting historical backdrop of archival footage, the relationship of these two women, which began as pupil and teacher when both were in their early 20s, grows into a remarkable lifelong friendship. Resonances between Kosal’s experience and that of Shanee’s grandmother, Gittel, who fled pogroms in Ukraine during the early 1920s to find refuge in Hartford, Connecticut, make it clear that across differences of culture and context, it is possible to build a bridge and be moved by each other’s stories.
Trailer link:
https://vimeo.com/1128459194/4babd1ee77?share=copy&fl=sv&fe=ci
(synopsis, continued from previous side). In a challenge to implicit stereotypes about a woman who earns a low wage and speaks English with a Cambodian accent, the many layers of Kosal’s experience are gradually revealed: the ordeals she endured in the four-year genocide; saving the lives of several others through ingenuity and daring; her narrow escape, on foot, to a refugee camp, while carrying her newborn daughter in her arms; the hardships she and her family faced during their six years in a Thai refugee camp; and, in 1985, at long last, their arrival in the United States. Through shots of Kosal’s day-to-day life in California, viewers come to appreciate the enormous challenges she has overcome in providing an education and solid values for her children in a low-income urban neighborhood in which pressures to join gangs, drop out of high school, and abuse drugs are ubiquitous. There are shots of and interviews with various members of Kosal’s family. These include her ex-husband, whom the Khmer Rouge had forced Kosal to marry on pain of death and who abandoned her and their 4 children shortly after their arrival in the US, and their eldest son, who served in the US army during the war in Iraq.
When Kosal’s father, a widely revered Buddhist monk, age 95, is on his deathbed, Kosal finally overcomes her fears of returning to Cambodia, and, after more than a 20-year absence, travels back to the Buddhist temple he heads, taking along her 17-year-old daughter, Saroeutrh Kayla, a vibrant young woman who was born in the refugee camp and is now thoroughly Americanized, yet intensely eager to learn about her heritage. At the temple, Kosal reunites with her beloved, long-lost sister Kim Sat (a Buddhist nun who is an extraordinary woman in her own right), and finally learns the fate of their four brothers.
Although in some ways specific to the Cambodian American experience, Threads: Kosal’s Reeltouches upon wider, archetypal themes that are relevant not only for refugees and immigrants, but for all human beings who seek wholeness, and who strive to preserve meaningful ties with family and friends, and to repair those connections that have been severed by historical and political events. The film’s title, and the imagery and motif of sewing, evoke the effort to gather the threads of one’s life, and to pick up the pieces one has lost along the way. The title also alludes to the continuing bonds between the dead and the living, and our ancestors and descendants.
Director/Producer: Shanee Stepakoff, MFA, PhD; Co-Producer, Editor: Tiffany Cunningham (BA, Yale Univ., 1989)
Associate Director, Associate Producer, Lead Cinematographer, Artistic Advisor: Alrick Brown, MFA
Consulting Producer, Editorial Consultant: Catherine Masud, MFA; Lead Khmer-English Translator: Sophy Theam
Eve Zucker is a sociocultural anthropologist affiliated with Yale University and Cornell’s Southeast Asia Program, and she currently serves as President of the Center for Khmer Studies. She has taught for several years at Yale and Columbia University, offering courses on mass violence, memory, and social repair. Her research focuses on how individuals and communities rebuild moral and social worlds after genocide, with extensive fieldwork in Cambodia and more recent work on Holocaust memory. She is the author of Forest of Struggle: Moralities of Remembrance in Upland Cambodia and co-editor of several volumes on coexistence, social repair, and digital memory, along with numerous peer-reviewed articles. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from the London School of Economics and an MA in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Ben Kiernan is A. Whitney Griswold Professor Emeritus of History at Yale University, and the Founding Director of Yale’s Cambodian Genocide Program and the Genocide Studies Program, MacMillan Center (1994-2015); Professor of International and Area Studies, MacMillan Center (2005-2021); and Faculty Affiliate, International Security Studies, Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs. Dr. Kiernan obtained his PhD from Monash University, Australia, and is the author of numerous articles and books, including How Pol Pot Came to Power (1985, 2004), Cambodia: The Eastern Zone Massacres (1986), and The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia Under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979 (Yale University Press, 1996), which is listed among The 100 Greatest Southeast Asian History and Politics Books. His 2007 book Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (2007) won the 2008 IBPA gold medal for best work of history. Dr. Kiernan was selected by Yale graduate students in the humanities as the 2018 recipient of the Inspiring Yale Award from the Yale School of Graduate Studies. Dr. Kiernan is the Convenor of the Yale East Timor Project (2000-02) and has edited several books, including, most recently, The Cambridge World History of Genocide (3 vols., 2023).
Shanee Stepakoff holds a BA in English, summa cum laude, from the University of Maine (2020), an MFA in creative writing from The New School, and is a PhD Candidate in English at the University of Rhode Island. She is the author of Testimony: Found Poems from the Special Court for Sierra Leone (Bucknell University Press, 2021), the first-place winner in the poetry category from the Independent Book Publishers Association (2022), and of over two dozen scholarly essays, articles, and chapters on literary and artistic responses to collective trauma. Shanee is also a practicing clinical psychologist who spent two years with the Center for Victims of Torture, first in Guinea and later in Jordan. From 2005 to 2007 she was the psychologist for witnesses at the UN-backed war crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone. In addition, she provided training and consultation for Cambodian organizations responsible for psychosocial support for witnesses in the Khmer Rouge tribunal. Shanee’s vision for Threads: Kosal’s Reel began crystallizing in early 1986, shortly after she graduated from college in Worcester, Mass. and moved to San Francisco, where she was a volunteer English-as-a-Second Language teacher for Cambodian refugee women and was assigned to teach a group of women in the home of the film’s protagonist, Kosal N.
Fiscal Sponsor: Filmmakers Collaborative,
https://filmmakerscollab.org/films/threads-kosals-reel/