Summary
Cinematographer turned filmmaker, Ellen Kuras (Summer of Sam, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, No Direction Home: Bob Dylan) dedicated years of her life to making the documentary, The Betrayal, a look at a family devastated by abandonment...
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment. |
| 0:13.8 | Welcome to The Treatment. |
| 0:15.1 | You can also hear this show at KCRW.com. |
| 0:18.3 | Ellen Curris has done both documentary and fiction film with some of the best known directors around, Spike Lee, Michelle Gondry, Rebecca Miller, and Martin Scorsese. |
| 0:27.2 | And on her own, she's directed a pretty amazing documentary, Connell the Betrayal. |
| 0:31.3 | Ellen, first of all, thanks so much for being here. |
| 0:33.3 | Thanks for being here, Ovis. |
| 0:34.6 | We go a long way back, so I'm really happy to see you. I'm happy, too, because when I saw the film at Sundance, it felt to me like one of the most personal documentaries I'd ever seen. |
| 0:45.3 | And part of that, as you would tell me, went back to your devotion to the material and the 20-plus years you'd spent shooting at. |
| 0:51.1 | Yeah, you know, I had had a long-term interest in Southeast Asia when I was in |
| 0:55.4 | college. I went to school at Brown in Providence, Rhode Island, and there were many Southeast |
| 1:00.1 | Asians who were moving into my neighborhood, Southeast Asian refugees. And I was really interested |
| 1:05.5 | in where they had come from because I was studying anthropology at the time as well as photography. |
| 1:11.8 | And I started photographing them and was struck by the fact that these people were coming to the United |
| 1:17.1 | States because of a war and a war that the United States had never really officially recognized. |
| 1:22.3 | And to this day, the United States has not officially recognized that we fought a war in Laos. |
| 1:26.6 | So I was kind of interested in what happens to people's identity when they come to a place and yet there's no valid reason for them being here. |
| 1:34.6 | But also because they come from such a diverse culture. |
| 1:39.3 | The Hmong come from the highlands of Laos and the lowland Laos come from the lower parts of the country |
| 1:45.4 | near Cambodia and Vietnam. And I was really interested in their kind of philosophical point |
| 1:52.6 | of view and the worldview. And it wasn't only until after I moved away from Providence that I |
| 1:57.3 | decided to make a film about them, thinking that I would use it as a thesis for a master's I was working on. |
... |
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