Film: Lost Child: Sayon’s Journey

This film by Cambodia adoptee Sayon Soeun premiered yesterday. There are two more showings in April. See the website for the film here.

“Sayon Soeun was abducted at the age of 6 and forced to become a child-soldier under Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge.

His journey included transition to an orphanage in a refugee camp, then adoption by an American family in Connecticut in 1983, at age 14.

Soeun eventually settled in Lowell, which has a large Cambodian population, and became a community activist. He serves as executive director of Light of Cambodian Children, a nonprofit seeking to improve the lives of children and immigrant families.

A new documentary of his life, “Lost Child: Sayon’s Journey” is being screened at Middlesex Community College in Lowell as part of its international film series on April 18.

Soeun will conduct a post-screening discussion.

After more than three decades, Soeun made contact with relatives he assumed were dead. He traveled to Cambodia to search for the truth about his family and to come to terms with the atrocities he saw and experienced as a child.

His sister-in-law Sopheap Theam, whose family escaped the Khmer Rouge genocide and emigrated to Connecticut, co-produced the film and traveled to Cambodia with Soeun.

In the film, he tells his story as he confronts his past, taking the viewer from the battlefields to the refugee camps and the challenges of resettlement.”

‘Lost Child: Sayon’s Journey’ is screened in Lowell

[Boston.com 4/4/13 by Wendy Killeen]

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