The Betrayal
Friday, 7:00 pm, Regal Downtown #4
Directors: Ellen Kuras, Thavisouk Phrasavath
Writers: Ellen Kuras, Thavisouk Phrasavath
Cinematographer: Ellen Kuras
Cast: The Phrasavath Family
Running Time: 96 min
Ellen Kuras is best known for her work on other artists’ films; she was the cinematographer behind Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Blow, and Neil Young: Heart of Gold, among many others. But for the past 23 years, Kuras has been quietly working on her own film, Nerakhoon (The Betrayal), a groundbreaking odyssey involving the CIA, alienation, and the ties that bind.
Interweaving archival footage, cinéma vérité, and interviews, it sings with a lyricism that accumulates over time, while shedding light on a grim and forgotten part of U.S. history: the covert bombardment of Laos during the Vietnam War. “I was more interested in making a true Film—a film poem about war, history, philosophy, and the Lao part in world history—than I was in making a straight-forward, conventional cinéma vérité documentary,” Kuras said in an interview with indieWIRE.
Nerakhoon centers on the story of Thavisouk Phrasavath, Kuras’s longtime friend and co-director, whom she met in New York in 1980. During the war, Phrasavath’s father had been recruited by the CIA to work intelligence along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. At the war’s end, with the U.S. withdrawal and Communist takeover, Thavi’s father was declared an enemy of the state; his family, thus endangered, decided to make a daring escape for the U.S. But life in the U.S. was not entirely a refuge for the refugees; the family found itself living in a single room next door to a Brooklyn crack house, and struggled to stay together and rebuild their family.
Cosponsored by the International Rescue Committee.
