Word: cambodias
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When French-Khmer graphic artist Ing Phouséra - or Séra, to use his pen name - first started drawing comics about life under the Khmer Rouge, he didn't have a lot to go on. He had fled Cambodia as a teen in April 1975, when Phnom Penh fell to Pol Pot's forces, and had lived in Paris his whole adult life. Visual arts - except in the service of propaganda - were banned during the four years of Khmer Rouge oppression, leaving scant images of a period in which nearly 20% of Séra's compatriots died...
...Growing up in Phnom Penh between the worlds of his French mother and Khmer father, Séra routinely escaped into the pages of French comics, and again as a young refugee in Paris. Now the author of a dozen graphic novels - three of which have been about Cambodia's war years - he is working to rekindle Cambodia's interest in the art form. Since his debut showing in Phnom Penh, he has been regularly returning to the city of his boyhood to hold workshops for aspiring illustrators. "It's important to try to approach the reality of our times...
...Cambodia started printing domestic comics in the mid-1960s, according to Our Books, an organization that archives comics that survived the war and promotes comic-book culture in Cambodia. Though many of that generation of artists were killed, some survived the Khmer Rouge years by drawing agricultural plans for the regime, or sketching small portraits of soldiers in exchange for food. After the Vietnamese deposed Pol Pot in 1979, comics enjoyed a bright but fragile reemergence in the 1980s, gaining a foothold in Phnom Penh's markets before the onslaught of television, movies and video that coincided with Cambodia...
...journalist intent on capturing the suffering of the Vietnamese during the war, Magnum photographer Philip Jones Griffiths was at first a hard sell in the U.S. Thanks in part to a lucrative shot of Jackie Kennedy in Cambodia, he kept working. His now classic 1971 book, Vietnam Inc., with its unprecedented texture and detail, dramatically influenced Americans' perception of the war. Griffiths, who had been in poor health...
Convicted of the 1994 kidnapping and murder of three backpackers in Cambodia, the former Khmer Rouge commander Sam Bith was sentenced to life in prison in 2002. David Wilson of Australia, Mark Slater of the U.K. and Jean-Michel Braquet of France were on a train when it was ambushed by Khmer Rouge fighters. The rebels had been waging a guerrilla war in the jungle after the violent four-year reign of their leader, Pol Pot, ended in 1979. Several Cambodians were killed in the 1994 attack. The three travelers were held for three months, then executed when ransom negotiations...