This film will also be available online on our VoD platform from April 18 to April 30, 2023. Please note: This film will only be available in Germany.
Language VoD platform: Original with German subtitles

»Is the transmission of memories important to you?«, Neary asks her mother, while watching her paint scenes of her former life in Cambodia. »You can’t transmit memories«, is her mother’s simple reply. Forty years after they fled the horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime together, Neary attempts to get her mother to tell her story. But how do you break decades of silence?

Confronted with her mother’s unwillingness to remember, Neary heads back to Cambodia alone, interviewing relatives and eyewitnesses, traversing the former refugee camp Khao-I-Dang on the border to Thailand, searching for traces of the past. But a yellowed sign plus scraps of crockery and tinned food are the only reminder of the hundreds of thousands of people who fled there to seek refuge from hunger, prison and death. Once back in France, Neary travels with her mother to the coast, to the place where they originally arrived. While looking out to sea, memories suddenly open up: mother and daughter become engrossed in the landscapes of the various stages of their migration story, and this brings them together. Neary asks her mother at the end of her journey what was she fleeing from back then. Her mother replies: death, imprisonment, the impossibility of saying no or being allowed to say anything at all. She says she was asked several times during her escape to leave her daughter behind, who was 3 months old at the time, in order to save her own life. She always emphatically refused. This portrait of a strong mother-daughter relationship provides testimony to the vital importance of resistance.