Arn Chorn-Pond, the musician whose story is the focus of "The Flute Player."
Posted on 07/23/2003 3:26:05 AM PDT by tdadams
Arn Chorn-Pond, the musician whose story is the focus of "The Flute Player."
For Arn Chorn-Pond, heaven and hell are tightly woven in long dulcet melodies played on a bamboo flute that sweeps errant memories back into view.
When he plays, he closes his eyes and rides the high notes back to his homeland, Cambodia, back to a youth spent struggling to survive in the notorious "killing fields."
In 1975, when the communist Khmer Rouge regime took control of Cambodia, soldiers forced Chorn-Pond and millions of other Cambodians into concentration camps. An estimated 2 million civilians were executed, starved or worked to death.
"The killing was everywhere," Chorn-Pond says. "I smelled blood every day in my life."
The youths were forced to watch the brutal beatings and executions. Anyone who wept was killed.
"If I showed any emotion, I was instantly killed by them," says Chorn-Pond, 37. "There was no space for crying for me."
Surrounded by death, music saved his life. Chorn-Pond learned to play the flute and performed propaganda songs for his captors.
More than 20 years later, he returned to Cambodia in search of the last surviving master musicians, hoping they would help him revive the classical music the Khmer Rouge almost obliterated. The trip forced him to confront a grim childhood wracked by war.
Chorn-Pond's journey is chronicled in the film "The Flute Player," which airs Tuesday, July 22 on PBS. Already, the movie has opened in film festivals in Seattle, Chicago and Los Angeles.
A few years ago, Jocelyn Glatzer, the film's producer, learned of Chorn-Pond's goal to restore a vestige of Cambodian culture that saved him.
"My intention was to make a film that addresses the complex issue of genocide," says Glatzer, who has known the musician since they attended the same Massachusetts high school in the mid-1980s. "There are so many important issues that come up in the film."
The film's pre-eminent theme revolves around survival: What it takes -- and ultimately means -- to survive war.
Chorn-Pond was 9 years old when he was separated from his family and sent to live with 500 youths in a Buddhist temple turned death camp. Every day, he witnessed murder. Sometimes, he was forced to hold the hands of victims while soldiers bludgeoned them with makeshift axes.
Two years into the war, the boy was tapped to join a musical troupe. He was given a flute and five days to study under a master musician before his teacher was executed. The Khmer Rouge sought to create an agrarian, classless utopia by killing artists, musicians, teachers and doctors -- anyone whose lives revolved around self-expression or education.
Chorn-Pond's family legacy is steeped in the tradition of classical performance. His grandparents owned an opera company, of which his father was the star. Other relatives worked in the business, too. Most of them died in the war.
"I played the flute for the Khmer Rouge while they were killing people because they didn't want to hear the crying," Chorn-Pond says. "I have flashbacks when I close my eyes."
In moments of utter darkness, music calmed his conscience.
"I played the flute. It took my mind somewhere. It was like I was in heaven. The sound of it saved me, literally," he said.
In 1979, when the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia, the then-12-year-old Chorn-Pond and other young boys were issued AK-47s and forced into battle. While fighting Vietnamese troops, he escaped and headed for the Thai border. Chorn-Pond eventually found his way to a refugee camp where American relief worker Peter Pond, a minister from Jefferson, N.H., found and adopted him.
In America, Chorn-Pond struggled adjusting to a new life. Always in the deep recesses of his mind, the music of his past played on.
Several years ago, he decided to return to the flute -- this time, playing music to shed light on the Cambodian genocide and to preserve the country's ancient music.
Glatzer's film follows Chorn-Pond as he returns to his homeland to launch the Cambodian Masters Performers Project. His crusade takes him from the gritty capital of Phnom Penh to the bucolic edges of the country in search of remaining classical musicians. Chorn-Pond records their music, listens to their stories and links them with younger Cambodians whom he hopes will carry on the tradition.
Most of the elderly musicians Chorn-Pond finds on his journey are poor and skeptical of his intentions. Along the way, he locates the former opera diva, Check Mach, in Phnom Penh, where she is selling cigarettes and charcoal on the streets. She is one of several musicians he eventually persuades to help with his project.
As Chorn-Pond works with the masters and witnesses their resilience, he cries for the first time since he was a boy.
"I'm glad I can learn how to cry," Chorn-Pond says. "They teach me how to do that."
It's truly hard to believe that people like those in the Khmer Rouge, Nazis, and Stalinist Russia could really exist, killing millions of people as if they're no better than insects, all for the quest to rule.
The show will air in again in some cities, see this page ("Check Local Listings" dead center) for your area.
In Cambodia, the stories of the survivors are often more poignant than the dead, e.g., "Along the way, he locates the former opera diva, Check Mach, in Phnom Penh, where she is selling cigarettes and charcoal on the streets."
And my friend the 36-year-old engineer, who told me that "My generation is ruined, we can only hope for our children."
Oddly, that's exactly the thought that crossed my mind as I watched this. I thought, they destroyed a whole generation. Cambodia will not recover from this until the children who are too young to remember grow into adulthood.
I'm visiting Cambodia in November.
It's generally agreed that Pol Pot was driven by the obsession to outdo Mao in terms of a Marxist agrarian "revolution." It was all outlined in the Sorbonne doctoral thesis of Khieu Samphan, "president" of Democratic Kampuchea under the murderous Khmer Rouge.
One thing you'll want to do if at all possible is to be in Phnom Penh for the first day or two of festivities including the fantastic boat races on the Tonle Sap. They last all three days but one or two is enough.
Then head up to Angkor Wat for the Buddhist ceremonies on the last day of the Festival (actually this is a separate celebration having to do with the beginning of the fishing season). They're held at the entrance to the main Angor Wat temple at night and are absolutely otherworldly (torches, candles, flowers, and hundreds of Buddhist monks). Since the festival is on a lunar calendar, you should have a semi-full moon, which allows you to walk around within the Angkor complex itself after the ceremony, in the dead of night (10PM or so). Dozens of people will be doing that but its still pretty spooky/wierd/breathtaking to be on the grounds in moonlight.
Cambodia is an exception to the rule, and in this case it's sadly true that Pol Pot "won". He did reach his goal.
By exterminating 20 percent of the population (the educated, the wealthy, the artists), Pol Pot and the KR did in fact remove all traces of Western influence from Cambodian life, and did in fact convert Cambodia into an agrarian, rice-exporting economy.
That specific goal was articulated by Khieu Samphan 20 years earlier in his Sorbonne doctoral thesis (BTW, all of the KR leaders were educated and learned Communism in France). They believed that Cambodia would become the true Marxist utopia by relying exclusively on its rice exports, expelling all "imperialist" thinking, and by turning the population into the two-legged equivalent of water buffalo (which was why thinking people - the "new people" - were executed).
So Pol Pot really did succeed, and it is evidenced in the devastation of today's Cambodia, as well as the shortage of teachers, doctors, lawyers, artists, and political leaders (actually these go hand-in-hand).
Ironically for the KR, it was after that first goal had been reached that they overreached for their second goal, which was their hallucinatory vision of removing the Vietnamese from what Cambodians call "Kampuchea Krom" - Little Cambodia - which is nearly the whole of South Vietnam (and had been Cambodian terrority until the 15th century).
So after a period of barbaric slaughters in the bordering Tay Ninh Province, and a fews days of rocket attacks on the town of Chau Doc, the Vietnamese finally responded. Phnom Penh went down in a matter of days, the KR was kicked into the jungle, and the Vietnamese occupied Cambodia for the next 12 years. But at least the slaughter stopped.
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