Inside the once majestic country of cambodia, after a decade of war, history witnessed the collapse of the regime. It would end with one of the worst genocides the world had ever seen. This memorial helps to ensure that the world never forgets those who died during the years of the cambodia killing fields. Yet, there is more to the story. There is the untold episode of the fate of tens of thousands of survivors who sought refuge inside thailand. This is my father in a refugee camp in 1980. I knew that my father was a survivor of the killing fields but i was shocked to learn that he and many thousands of others faced a more terrifying atrocity. The massacre on the mountain here. He always pushed me to tell him the story and i always said to him i dont want to. I dont want to relive it again. He would say just tell me one time. That is how we get here to do a documentary. James taing, that is the opening to your documentary, Ghost Mountain. Tell me about this project. James this is the story of my father and the survival of the killing fields of cambodia. It is considered the second holocaust but if you go down to the youth, it really is not in memory. It is sort of the history they are taught. That is one thing we were trying to make up for. What we really focused on is the story that nobody has really heard about. It has been lost and undocumented. It happened after the fall of the khmer rouge in 1975. Things spiraled to really epic proportions. My father and many other refugees found himself in a story that i think it is important that i think is important and everyone should hear. You said in that opening clip that for much of your childhood he really would not talk about his past even though you pressed for it many times. Why did he finally agree . James it took a lot of persistence on my side. One of the reasons why i personally wanted to do the story was i was coming of age from high school to college. I dealt with a large challenge in my life. I always knew that my father was a survivor and we would watch the killing fields movie and he would make comments like i have been through worse than that. Or there were times when i wouldnt finish my food, and he would say i would do anything to , eat that last bit of food. So he disciplined me in that way, and as i was coming of age, i really wanted to know because i really saw a resilience in him. I began to ask him what exactly happened to you . Like he said he did not want to , tell the story. I had to really try. What i did was i took some of my favorite authors like elie wiesel. He told of his time in the holocaust. I told him he made a big impact. I just came back day after day and went after him more, and one ok, he told me that he would tell me a little bit. His idea was that he thought i would give up. He would share enough for me and it would whet my appetite and i would be good. But i found his story incredible. I became sort of obsessed with it. I thought it was a one in one billion story of survival that i had never heard ever. Susan walk me through that sequence from the conversation to the idea to do a documentary. When did that conversation happened and when did you decide to document this . James being of my nature, im the type who likes to write things out and chronicle lies things. Chroniclize things. I went back to when he grow up when he grew up. Iwould look at family photos , would play with toys, balls, they had movie theaters. There are things like that that i really wanted to record. It just went on and snowballed from there. I dont want to spoil it but at some point, there was later on in the film, there was somebody who he connects with. Someone who sort of is part of his story in cambodia where with that moment, we all collected we all said we need to document this in a film. It is important that we do this now before time is lost and this sort of history is buried forever. Susan why do you think it is important for an audience in the United States to hear the story . James for me, i wanted to tell the story because it is survival. It gave me so much inspiration to persevere and have resilience. For people today, i think this is something that you can put a high mark on where everyone is going through it at once. I would like to show the indomitable will of the human spirit. I also wanted to give tribute to a lot of the Unsung Heroes back then. The volunteers who did so much, these are people both from the private ngos and even the public. Many state Department Workers this is a part of history that i think we should embrace in our american heritage. Its something we can celebrate because it tells us a lot about our compassion, our empathy. This falls on the backdrop of the vietnam war where nobody wants to deal with that anymore. We still have individuals who are really daring to do that. Susan had you ever made a film before . James this was my first time. Susan how did you go about it . This is an enormous undertaking without any experience. Tell me how you put it all together. James i am from the Financial Services industry. Had beenid, i documenting my story for a long time when i was working for many, many years. I suppose that as this more important piece of the story where an individual who is connected to my fathers story comes into the picture, we had an opportunity to work with a coproducer who was brought in and also very interested in this. The expectation at the beginning was lets sit down and interview them in the sunroom and see what they had to say. We could tease out what that story was. We could see where it went. Later on, that snowballed into interviewing the next person in d. C. , the next person in north carolina. And lo and behold, we were on the borders of thailand and cambodia. It sort of took on a life of its own. Susan was this the first time you had ever been to cambodia . James third time fourth time i would say. I had to learn all the ropes, and my coproducer had done a film prior about lyme disease. So i learned from her about being behind the camera, editing here and there, to directing people on the floor and sending out these sites, it has been a thrill. Susan how did you finance this project . James we had our executive producer who was involved since the beginning. Financed a large portion of it. And then we also had donors, many of them who were my fathers clients. My father was somebody who connected he has his cleaning business. Painting business. He paints a lot of houses in southern connecticut. So he meets a lot of people. And they always ask where he is from. He says he is from cambodia and he is able to make these really delicate and unique and special relationships with people. We were fundraising and we sent it out. They were also very generous and kind to help us. Susan along the way, you created a nonprofit foundation, how does that mix into the production of the film . James this one is done with as a nonprofit. We really wanted this film to be educational. We did not want to do anything in terms of making big bucks. I also had this longerterm goal of creating a museum out of this. It was not just primarily this film, it was whatever would tell the story. I thought the ultimate of that would be somewhere along where along the border where this incident happened. There would be someday where i could go to a museum and show that i help tell the story physically in that location. It would honor and uphold that memory and ensure that it would not be lost. Susan you have graciously agreed to show the cspan audience the majority of your documentary. We will show it in large clips and then have you give the back story along the way. When exactly did you make the trip to cambodia . James that was approximately 2016. Susan you have been working on this project for quite a few years now. James it has been since 2014, july. I have been working on this story since 2010, over 10 years. Susan when you travel to traveled to cambodia, how large was your entourage . James we had a crew of seven or eight people at a time. Susan when you went there, did you have very specific goals in filming . Were you going to let it build as you went along . James that is a great one. We knew where we were going, we had planned it out precisely. We had only three weeks, and only had a limited time and budget. We went straight for the areas where my father was. He had not been back in over 37 years according to the film. It is always uncertain. Although we know the location and where we are going, we dont know what is there in that mountain, we had no idea what we would capture. That was the sort of fun of the filmmaking that was sort of the fun of the film making process. You take what you are given, especially in documentary work. It is your job as artist and creator to rearrange that. It is really provocative to the audience. Susan with that background, lets let the story unroll. We will begin with the first 10 minutes of this documentary, Ghost Mountain. Lets watch. I never thought i would leave the country. In cambodia, you have a great time. You would play pingpong and soccer. Go out with your friends. I was the youngest of eight children. My family was very close. My dream was to have a piece of land, build my own house near a pond and raise my own animals. To have lots of kids. Luckily, cambodia was full of good food. No one was starving before the war. My childhood was living outside of a really modern city. Growing up in pulp pat, it was somewhat growing up in city, it was somewhat of a western life. Her story tells us of many ways. Was turningime, tv from blackandwhite to color, and rock n roll came in. I was exposed to the english language at a very early age. I grew up with mick jagger and the beatles. As well as the cambodian music scene. Then the war came in. The war really stopped life of all means. In cooperation with the armed forces of south vietnam, we will be cleaning out major enemys actuaries on the cambodianvietnam border. This is not an invasion of cambodia. This began years of intensified bombing campaigns from 19701973, the u. S. Dropped more bombs on cambodia then they dropped on japan during the second world war. Equivalent to five hiroshima bombs. Bunseng my family went to the countryside near the thai border. American bombing caused great instability. Enabling the communists mirror move khmer rouge, once a small faction, to gain power. The leader, pol pat envisioned a revolution. He aimed to wipe out everything that was determined to be modern. When the country fell in 1975, the army purged of the city and committed atrocities on an unbelievable scale. Thida when we were forced out of the city, my father told me everything is going to be ok. That was the last time i remember my father. 7 Million People were forced into labor camps. Bunseng they told us this is your place. You have to build your own house and you have to grow your own food to feed yourselves. When my father got sick and i tried to go and visit him, i was captured by the khmer and rouge and tortured for days. 40 it is all mass killing. They take all of our food. So we were starving. No medical care. People were dying from all of that. Between 1975 and 1979, one third of cambodias population was either executed or tortured or starved to death. The genocide would become known as the killing fields. They were killing off all the people from the city and coming close to my village. And they stopped. The reason was, there was a coup penh. In the phnom 1978, comedies the enemies troops invaded phnom penh. We had to make the escape because the chance of surviving in another communist regime was very low for all of us. Bunseng i reunited with my father and my father told me we had to get out of the country because we dont know the situation of the country. We have to get out now. We made our own oxcart, our own wheels from scratch. We prepared this for a threemonth journey. As refugees began to amass on the border of thailand, a group of Frontline International workers scrambled to help. We were disappointed there wasnt more public outcry. This was a major human rights violation. With just us trying to get some attention from the western press on this, the thai press covered it if at all, barely. After this time, the Thai Government believed that many vietnamese agents would penetrate their borders. They were reluctant to allow refugees across into thailand. We did not have a large refugee program. He sought help from mckellen thompson had been working with refugees macallen thompson had been working with refugees in vietnam. We sort of doubled up the problems on the Thai Government with all these very large numbers of people coming in, illegal aliens. It looked like people coming right out of auschwitz. What were they going to do with them . Many died on the way. By the time my father made it to the border, the Thai Government had agreed to allow some survivors to be brought into makeshift border camps. Bunseng thousands of people poured into the border. I remember before they put us in the pen, it would bring the truck to the border and help us get on the truck. This was the first time that we saw electricity. We were so happy. We all threw our hands up in the air, it is freedom. It is freedom. We couldnt believe our luck. Our spirits were high, we were hopeful. We were cut off from the world for four and a half years. Bunseng we make it to the refugee camp. Surrounding it was barbed wire. One of the best times i had with my family. Every day we enjoyed every moment at the refugee camp. We played music, we talked to friends. We talked about the past and about the future. Susan were watching a segment of the documentary, Ghost Mountain. We are with its producer, james taing. He is talking us to us from new york city via zoom. There are so many questions. We dont have lots of time. Let me ask you from a political standpoint, how have you and your father processed u. S. Policy during that time and its impact on cambodia . James one of the portions of the story that we really have to tell is the impact on war policy and Foreign Policy and the collateral damage. What happened in cambodia was an outflow of vietnam, where kissinger and nixon illegally bombed vietnam. The country gets splintered from it and goes into a civil war revolution. For myself and my father, we can only speak of the mixed feelings where he did not know that the u. S. Was bombing. He only knew of pol pot and the regime. He wouldnt know this history until he came to the u. S. For him, he felt the efforts that people made on these refugee camps, he knew they were directly from the International Community and westerners. He has always had some sort of admiration for the u. S. And what they did. I think its a very complicated area. For me i want to continue the , story because it is an important story to tell. Like what are we doing overseas . What are we doing overseas . What places are getting , involved . How often do we do that . We have to not only count the cost, but we have to know the stories of peoples lives that change from this. What did you need in the way information from the cambodian antigovernment to do your filming . James we had to do our normal film licensing there. Every location, you had to ask for rights in the capital city like phnom penh. Four the locations of the refugee camps on the thai border, we had to work with the Border Forces there. We had friends, we were good friends with some of the generals there. We were very fortunate with that. They were able to escort us in and get us they gave us footage that had never been taken in that area. Susan were you surprised that they were welcoming of your telling of the story . James for some part. They themselves know some of the story and they go through there and they do morning patrols and when they find that people from the past are coming there and wanting to film, it sort of got them excited. They were like wow, this region can really become it can get more attention. It can get more people coming here. So that, for them, was personally rewarding on their side. Susan where did you find all of that vintage footage that you used . James a lot of it was donated by the red cross, International Red cross. A lot of news organizations in france had archives as well. The World Hunger Program as well. There are some that ap give us the license for and reused. We used. We were very fortunate. A lot of this time, people went and there were journalists that went there to document. Vietnam was one of the first televised wars. When cambodia had instances there, there were many people who had cameras out. That allowed us to use that and we use that to help tell the story in a dignified manner. Susan the last question before we go back and watch the next segment, how did you find thida . Why did she agree to sit down in front of your camera . James she is a very important character. She had grown up in cambodia to a wellknown diplomat. She was very educated and spoke english. When she came to the u. S. , she had someone write her book. In the early days when i was researching, i had read that book. It was mainly focused on the killing fields of cambodia, the genocide. There was one chapter that goes through everything will detail my father talked about. This was a time when there was nothing i could find about it. I reached out to her on facebook. The world of social media. She said i have to tell the story, i am so thankful for it as well. Anything i needed, she was willing to help with it. Susan lets return to the documentary and see the story unfold. There was resettlement going on. Even then, you are not sure if they would be processed, where they would go, what would become of them. For most of the people, they did not know if they would get resettled. They lived with constant anxiety over this. We also did not know. In fact, we were told that everybody would be pushed back to cambodia any day now. We were up there, constantly, trying to identify those closest to the u. S. And send them off to other camps away from the border. My fathers happy interlude in the border camp was shortlived. Arrived rescue workers in buses and began calling out names. After committing the relief workers to get in just a few thousand refugees, to cut off the rescue and forced a desperate mob back into the camp. Bunseng the next day, those we heard a rumor that those people were forced back to the border. After just one day, they came to us. The thai soldiers came with the bus and said we can go to a third country. Thida they told us youre going to bangkok, a refugee camp in bangkok. There is this mixed feeling of fear and happiness, we dont know. We knew something was going on. All of these buses were carrying refugees away from the camps. Somewhere, we did not know where. We said that we would be killed, we ran to the corner and cried and begged him not to s