By ROBERT TURNBULL
PHNOM PENH — The Victorian writer Anthony Trollope once described his characters as “ordinary people doing extraordinary things.” From his Khmer Mekong Films studios here, Matthew Robinson and his staff create made-for-television tales of everyday people living exceptional lives.Dubbed “the Pope of Soap” by the British newspaper The Sun, Mr. Robinson was a longtime executive producer of the British series “EastEnders,” now in its 26th year. Arriving in Cambodia in 2003, he applied the same formula to create three groundbreaking series for Cambodian television, with a fourth now in the works.
Why Cambodia? He saw an advertisement for an executive producer to set up a drama there and responded.
“After 37 years hacking at Britain’s TV coal face,” Mr. Robinson said recently in Phnom Penh, “I relished the chance to combine my acquired creative skills with teaching a public service project in a faraway country of which I knew little.”
After decades of civil strife, Cambodia remains the focus of comprehensive development. Western governments and their agencies have stepped in, invested as they are in these countries and keen to get multiple messages across.
Mr. Robinson’s first series, “Taste of Life,” was financed in 2003 by the British development agency DFID and managed by the BBC World Service Trust. Its purpose was to educate the Cambodian public about H.I.V. and AIDS. Mr. Robinson conjured a realistic narrative set in a hospital, using a vérité style that Cambodians quickly found irresistible — at one point 5.6 million viewers, or 40 percent of the country’s 14 million people, were watching. It ran for 100 episodes, from 2004 to 2006 on CTN, Cambodia’s most popular commercial TV channel.
The Cambodians picked up acting quickly, and a British crew was hired to teach them everything else, from set design to sound recording and special effects. Within two years Mr. Robinson had a skilled staff of 17 Cambodians handling most aspects of production.
In 2006 a second series, “AirWaves,” was commissioned by the U.S. State Department with the aim of discouraging Islamic fundamentalism and improving relations between the country’s majority Khmer and small Cham Muslim communities. The United States was also seeking to create a template that might serve other Southeast Asian nations.
“Cambodia was included as a sort of pre-emptive measure,” said Roy Schmadeka, of Impact International Solutions, the communications firm hired to initiate the project. Although Al-Qaeda terrorist incidents were neither known nor expected, “there was some concern of Islamist sympathizers residing amongst the Muslim population,” Mr. Schmadeka said.
The challenge, said Mr. Robinson, was to help Cambodians better understand the Chams, a and marginalized minority, while avoiding the suggestion that radicalism was a potent force in Cambodia. Leaders of Muslim communities were brought in as advisers and Mr. Robinson employed Arabic speakers to train Cambodian actors in Koranic verses.
The 52-episode series follows Sokhum, a young journalist who falls in love with a woman named Farina while reporting the outbreak of a riot centered around the village mosque. A Cham who has kept his ethnic identity secret, Sokhum is persuaded to “come out” under Farina’s influence. A third principal Cham character is a moral arbiter, or hakim, introduced by Mr. Robinson to underscore the group’s ethical core.
The series was nearly canceled over a story line featuring a young man returning from the Middle East with jihadist tendencies. Neither the Cambodian nor the U.S. government wanted “to highlight local involvement — however benign or, in our case, fictional — with terror groups, so the original story had to change its focus from involvement with terror groups to criminal gang involvement,” Mr. Schmadeka said.
The issue was addressed, finally, with call-ins during the last 10 episodes, in which listeners aired various grievances. By mid-series, about 4 million people were tuning in.
Mr. Robinson had barely finished “Air Waves” when he was approached by the War Crimes Studies Center at the University of California at Berkeley to make a semi-dramatized series that would introduce Cambodians to the Extraordinary Chambers in the Court of Cambodia (ECCC) set up jointly by the Cambodian government and the United Nations to prosecute senior members of the Khmer Rouge for its reign of terror that killed an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979.
This was a departure from the “edu-tainment” of the first two series. Called “Time for Justice,” the series was aired several times on CTN and involved a fictional family meeting real lawyers and judges. It was such a success that the British Embassy decided to finance a larger project, “Duch on Trial,” a series of weekly court reports on the first Khmer Rouge leader brought before the court, who was tried and convicted in July 2010.
“It wasn’t just about introducing the legal process to the millions of Cambodians who know nothing about it, but explaining why someone like Duch, a mass murderer who pleaded guilty, had to have a fair trial,” Mr. Robinson said. “In a country where corruption is endemic, disputes are usually sorted out on a local level through the village chief or payment to a member of the political elite.”
“Duch on Trial” is best seen in the context of the ignorance among the younger generation of Cambodians of those terrible years. Silence within families has been compounded until very recently by the governmental removal of any discussion about the worst Khmer Rouge excesses from the educational curriculum.
Mr. Robinson suggested 25-minute highlights of the trials. “We were the only ones to report on the event as opposed to just having a camera present throughout the hours of boring deposition,” he said. The suggestion paid off. Before the first episode aired in March 2009, Mr. Robinson asked patrons of his local bar if they would watch the trial and the answer was a resounding no; a week later he returned to find them hooked.
“If the ECCC is to satisfy the demand for justice and reconciliation in Cambodia, it is important for its legal proceedings to be accessible to the general public,” said Andrew Mace, the British ambassador to Cambodia. “We supported the ‘Duch on Trial’ series as a great way of demystifying the processes of the court.”
The U.S. State Department grant is supplementing British and private funding for the second trial, said Lesley Saunderson of the British Embassy.
Round 2 promises to be longer and more dramatic. The four on trial this year — including Ieng Tirith, a Shakespeare scholar married to Pol Pot’s No. 2, Ieng Sary — proclaim their innocence while challenging the court’s legitimacy. It will make great television, Mr. Robinson said.
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