A photographer with no soul

San Francisco Chronicle, USA

Hugh Hart
Friday, February 13, 2009

On Tuesday, a U.N.-backed war crimes tribunal begins prosecuting five leaders of Cambodia's notorious Khmer Rouge regime. Better late than never, as far as Berkeley filmmaker Steven Okazaki is concerned. His Oscar-nominated short documentary, "The Conscience of Nhem En," takes viewers inside the walls of Tuol Sleng Prison. An estimated 17,000 Cambodian citizens entered the former school between 1975 and 1979. Eight lived to tell the tale. The rest were photographed, then executed.

"I've dug pretty deep into misery before, but 'The Conscience of Nhem En' is really the most difficult documentary I've ever made," Okazaki says.

He pitched HBO Documentary Films on the subject after reading about prison photographer Nhem En in 2007. When he was 16 years old, En took pictures of 6,000 prisoners shortly before their deaths.

"He came out of the woodwork because he thought he could make some money and wanted attention, I guess," Okazaki says.

Last year, Okazaki spent 2 1/2 weeks in Cambodia and questioned Nhem En on camera.

"I asked him numerous times, 'Did you ever just give these people a sympathetic look as if to say, "I'm sorry," and he said, 'Absolutely not. Why should I?' I found that disturbing. He appears to be a friendly, gentlemanly guy, but that's just on the surface. Underneath, he's a soulless, cold person."

Closely monitored by government security operatives, Okazaki managed to elicit frank accounts of incarceration from three survivors.

"Meeting these remarkable people became the great experience of making this film," Okazaki says. "They are all very emotionally scarred, but each of them has a certain spirit, and they were just lucky. One of the guys talks about being tortured for two weeks until someone came around asking, 'Does anyone know how to fix sewing machines?' He said, 'I do, I do!' That's how he got to live."

Okazaki is no stranger to bleak subject matter. He's made documentaries about teen drug addicts ("Black Tar Heroin"), Japanese American internment camps (the 1991 Oscar-winner "Days of Waiting") and nuclear devastation ("The Mushroom Club," nominated in 2006).

But "Conscience" took an unprecedented emotional toll during postproduction, he says.

"I'd blank out throughout the process of cutting the film and not know it; people would say to me, 'What happened? You just stopped talking for 10 seconds.' I found myself weeping at odd moments. I had diagnosable second-degree post-traumatic stress."

Next up for Okazaki: a documentary about Seattle street kids who have been thrown out of their homes by their parents. The filmmaker half jokes that he also hankers to make a movie with no redeeming social value whatsoever.

"I'm trying as hard as I can to do something totally irrelevant and stupid, so I've approached the producers of 'The Simpsons' about doing the life story of Homer Simpson."


He played the director of a surreal theatrical production in "Synecdoche, New York." Now Philip Seymour Hoffman will be taking the reins, for real, of his first movie. Filming begins this month on the dark romantic comedy "Jack Goes Boating," adapted from Bob Glaudini's off-Broadway play staged by Hoffman's LAByrinth Theater Company

Though "Jack" marks Hoffman's debut as a film director, he hardly lacks experience. The Oscar-winning actor directed a Sydney stage production of "Riflemind" in 2007 and has helmed many New York plays.

"It is beyond gratifying to see this film come to life," he says.

Hoffman also will act in "Jack," opposite Amy Ryan ("Gone Baby Gone"), with John Ortiz ("American Gangster") and Daphne Rubin-Vega (Broadway's "Rent") reprising their stage roles for the film.

Five Bay Area moviemakers will receive six months' worth of rent-free production facilities starting in May, when Phase 2 of the San Francisco Film Society's FilmHouse Residencies initiative kicks in. Developed in partnership with the San Francisco Film Commission, the program named 10 recipients in the fall.

The new residents include Rajendra Serber, a dancer, choreographer and filmmaker who plans to finish his intergalactic space opera "GoodGuy/BadGuy." Serber produced a stage version of "GoodGuy/BadGuy" in 2001 and has gradually transformed the multimedia performance piece into an experimental animation project incorporating improvised dialogue, music and 700 photos.

"Instead of a normal film process, where you write a screenplay, get funding and shoot, we decided to use the tools we already knew," he says.

FilmHouse Residencies at the Embarcadero's Pier 27 have also been awarded to Eugene Corr, who's finishing his portrait of a baseball coach, "From Ghost Town to Havana"; Miles Matthew Montalbano, who is working on "The Recondite Heart," about a Reagan-era punk rocker; Melissa Regan, whose "No Dumb Questions" is about gender identity; and Valerie Soe, who is editing her slumlord documentary, "The Oak Park Story."

Serber hopes the institutional seal of approval from the film society will raise his profile in local film funding circles.

"I have a few months to beat down doors and say, 'These people are invested in supporting me now,' " he says. " 'You should support me, too.' "

Hugh Hart is a Chronicle correspondent. E-mail him at pinkletters@sfchronicle.com.