Independent Lens: New Year Baby

Tuesday, May 27 at 10 p.m.

What would you do if everything you knew about your life was turned upside down? If your sisters weren’t really your sisters and your mother was married to someone else before your father? In her personal and moving film New Year Baby, Socheata Poeuv finds that long-held secrets hide not only painful memories, but also love forged under inhuman conditions. Independent Lens: New Year Baby, hosted by Terrence Howard, airs Tuesday, May 27 at 10 p.m. on WXXI-TV 21 (cable 11) and WXXI-HD (cable 1011 and DT 21.1).

Born in a refugee camp on April 13—the Cambodian New Year’s Day—Socheata Poeuv has always been called “the lucky one” by her family. Her parents, Ma and Pa, survived the Khmer Rouge, one of the cruelest political regimes ever documented, eventually escaping to Thailand and then moving the entire family to Texas. Once in the United States, Ma and Pa never talked about what happened in Cambodia, focusing instead on giving the kids a “normal American life.”

On Christmas Day 2002, with the entire family gathered together, Socheata’s parents reveal a secret they had kept for more than 25 years: Her older sisters weren’t really her sisters at all, and her brother was only her half-brother, the
child of her mother’s previous marriage. While reeling from this new information, Socheata wonders what other secrets her parents might have left behind in Cambodia. She embarks on an emotional journey with Ma and Pa to their homeland, retracing the family’s path and picking up the lost pieces of her history along the way. She finds that to get to the bottom of her family’s story, she must understand what happened to her former country as well.

Using animation to illustrate family memories and the country’s history, New Year Baby intertwines the stories of Ma and Pa with those of millions of others who suffered under the Khmer Rouge. In fewer than four years, more than 1.7 million Cambodians—about one-fourth of the population—died from starvation, disease or execution.

Taking Ma and Pa back to places filled with sadness, Socheata pleads, prods and pries, trying to get them to answer questions they have dodged so many times before. How did her parents, a mismatched couple with little in common, come to be together? What happened to them in the Khmer Rouge labor camps? How did they survive the genocide when so many others died? And why had they never told the truth? New Year Baby is the story of love that carried a family around land mines, across borders and across an ocean—a love so powerful not even the Khmer Rouge could destroy it.

For more information, visit pbs.org/independentlens/newyearbaby.

Pictured: Socheata Poeuv at Angkor Wat, Cambodia.
Photo Credit: Charles Vogl/ITVS