Beyond the Killing Fields: Refugees on the Thai-Cambodian Border

From 1980, tens of thousands of Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees fled war to makeshift camps along the Thai–Cambodian border. Filmed by Taiwan’s Kuangchi Program Service, this documentary captures the peril of foraging in minefields and the resilience of song and dance amid bombardment. The first privately funded Golden Horse Best Documentary, it reshaped Taiwanese documentary discourse.

Lee Daw-ming: ‘Beyond the Killing Fields: Refugees on the Thai-Cambodian Border opens with a military exercise organised by the resistance forces. When we heard it was going to happen, we knew we had to film it — after all, we couldn’t actually go into the battlefield. Military drills don’t wait for you. You have to follow them, film on the move, and capture everything in real time; no one is going to stop while you get the camera ready. Whenever the cinematographer Chen Sung-mao ran after them, I ran alongside him. We were like “conjoined twins”, because my sound had to stay in sync with his images. If he ran, I ran. Whatever he filmed, I had to record the sound; whatever I recorded, he had to have the image.Back then everything was very “hand-crafted”. We decided everything on the spot. There was no way to plan ahead or write a script about what we were going to film. The topic and overall direction were clear, of course, but we had no idea who would become our subject or what we would end up capturing. We just had to react as things happened.’