Freedom Deal: Behind the Scenes of a Vietnam-War Themed Cambodian Indie Film

Freedom Deal: The Story of Lucky is one standalone section of the completed screenplay, also called Freedom Deal. It's set in 1970, during the US-Vietnamese incursion into Cambodia. In the screenplay version, it cuts back and forth between the US soldier, Shaky Griffith, and his unit, and the local Cambodians. I'll have to go through the script again, I'm going by recollection here, but there's also some dialogue with a Viet Cong character, and North Vietnamese Army characters in the beginning, at the staging grounds near Wat Sambok, in Kratie. It was written as a feature initially. I didn't set out to write a short. I set out to write, and did write, a feature.

So where does that start from? It starts from research and an idea. One time, way back in 2007, I believe it was, I was going to Kratie, this Mekong River town, and took the minivan up there. On the way we stopped in this strange crossroads town named Snuol, the American anglicized spelling. There was something really weird about it. The feeling there was so strange, I couldn't put a handle on it. It had this resonant feeling to me, so much so that I looked it up later.

So I looked up Snuol, Cambodia, and immediately what came up was that it was one of the main crossroads towns that experienced pitched fighting between the US, meaning United States forces, and ARVN, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, on one side, and North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces on the other. There might have been supporting units from South Korea, New Zealand, or Australia too, I'm not sure, I'd have to look into that. But it was the US and ARVN incursion into Cambodia, to locate and destroy North Vietnamese and Viet Cong installations, personnel, and supplies.

Most of the encounters between the US and ARVN along the border didn't turn into fighting at all. They'd discover hundreds or thousands of tons of rice, medical gear, and equipment, because the NVA and Viet Cong had slipped away. But in Snuol, they actually had pitched fighting, real heavy combat, between North Vietnamese, presumably Viet Cong too, though I'm not sure of the numbers, and the US and ARVN mechanized divisions coming in from Vietnam. So once I found that out, I realized, that's why it feels so strange there. It's a historical town.

Isn't that odd? Isn't it strange, to be in Cambodia, where you've got the Khmer Rouge, but you've also got the Cambodian Republic under Lon Nol fighting the Khmer Rouge, and then you've got the US, the Army of South Vietnam, North Vietnamese, Viet Cong, and that doesn't even count any Chinese advisers. So you've got at least six armies swirling around, and to me, that was fascinating.

It's little known. Most people's association between the Vietnam War and Cambodia is the American bombing campaign, the illegal bombing, and their historical reference point has been boiled down pretty simplistically and inaccurately to that.

By the way, Freedom Deal, the actual operation, was an air operation: coordinated air strikes and air assaults. But I want to point out something. It's true that Operation Menu, the secret bombing of the border enclaves in 1969, I believe it was, was illegal, because it wasn't announced to Congress, and it wasn't announced to Lon Nol, or to SNC, or to any of the Cambodian stakeholders, obviously not the Vietnamese either. But every major air campaign after that was undertaken in coordination with the Cambodian Republic. Americans helped coordinate the strikes, but they were always cross-checked, in theory. I'm sure some slipped through the cracks.

And by the way, I'm not defending the US involvement in Cambodia or Indochina. Personally, I think all of the Western involvement in Indochina at the time was a mistake, including France, including Japan during World War II, and the US.

So anyway, that was the inciting moment, that's what got my imagination going. I said, well, I don't want to make a documentary about it, what about a fictionalized story? So I decided to write the script, and I researched it: what units were coming in, what was the name of the operation, what was the backstory of the Cambodian incursion.

The 1970 incursion, by the way, they call it Nixon's incursion, that's what the Kent State students were protesting against. When Nixon announced it, it was perceived as an expansion of the war. He was caught between a rock and a hard place, unfortunately. Only four top-level military personnel knew exactly when the operation, I think it was called Operation Rock Crusher, Ton Tang in Vietnamese, I forget the pronunciation, would happen. Lon Nol's own generals weren't notified. Why was that? Lon Nol had requested general assistance, and every major operation before that had leaked: once you mentioned it to the top echelons of the Army of South Vietnam, they'd get bribed, they'd leak to the NVA, and it was over. This time, the operation was confined in detail to only four personnel. It was extremely well preserved. The grunts, the units, the vehicles, they all knew they were preparing to do something, they were told to stand by for an operation, but they didn't know where or when. That might have been enough to alert a lot of the NVA or Viet Cong units, but it wasn't enough to prevent contact, complete contact, all the way down the line. And that's what happened in Snuol.

The two characters you see in Freedom Deal: The Story of Lucky are part of a big wedding party in the story, and it gets accidentally bombed by a column of B-52 airstrikes. That's based loosely on an actual event that took place in Neak Loeang, Cambodia: a wedding was accidentally bombed, and there was devastation.

It's not defensible, the whole Western involvement in Indochina. I'm not talking just about America, France too, the whole thing, and in retrospect that's underscored by the fact that both nations were kicked out. Did the domino theory take effect? It partly did. Laos became socialist, communist. Cambodia's a semi-democracy with communist strands in it. Thailand was ostensibly a democracy, now it's become strongman military led. Same with Burma, though it didn't become communist.

So that's the backstory: researching and writing. I did a lot of research. I read diaries of B-52 airmen, one that stuck with me in particular was the diary of a B-52 pilot named Frank Elkins. He knew his bombs were killing hundreds of civilians on each raid, and his anguish comes through in a diary entry from July 1st, 1966, where he wrote about the deep shame he felt at his own lack of emotional reaction, that he kept responding as though he were simply watching a movie of the whole thing, still not feeling like he'd personally killed anyone. I researched the Kent State material too, and had a musician colleague, Robert Lewis, an originating member of Devo, who advised the project and shared anecdotes about the US side of things. Devo were from Kent, they were students at Kent State, and they were influenced and affected by the protests there. The Kent State protests were in response to the perceived expansion of the war in Vietnam. I also stayed in touch with a number of people who'd been involved with the Kent State protests directly, some of them curious to hear the other side of the story, but I was a little surprised at where their focus stayed: even though they'd been protesting the expansion of the war into Cambodia, most of their attention was still on the four students shot on their own campus, not the far larger scale of what that same escalation did to Cambodian civilians. I always thought that was a bit asymmetrical.

Nixon was stuck, he couldn't announce it, or it would be an absolute failure. It was about getting the troops out, there was real military theory behind it. In fact, the US and ARVN incursion was one of the best organized and most effective operations of the war. The whole point of it was to destroy North Vietnamese and Viet Cong enclaves, depots, equipment, supplies, and personnel along the Cambodian border, where they'd otherwise retreat beyond a line they weren't technically allowed to be pursued across. Then, as US forces were converging on Saigon to withdraw from Vietnam, the NVA and Viet Cong would attack from those sanctuaries, attacking the flanks. It was impossible to buy the time to get out of Vietnam unless they first liquidated those sanctuaries, that was the whole premise of the incursion.

I called it Freedom Deal just because of the name. This is a movie, and none of the other military operation names felt suitable. Freedom Deal has a ring to it. It's not related to the air campaign, only tangentially.

So, researching and writing the script took an awful lot of time. It's a full length screenplay, I registered it with the Writers Guild of America in 2012. I went into it with the intention of trying to get it made as a feature.

109 pages, minus the ending. So why didn't I just make the feature? I didn't have access to funding, and it's a military movie, so it's got a lot of vehicles, armaments, and pyrotechnics. There's a philosophy that you're only supposed to write a screenplay you're actually able to make, that's one school, the indie school. The other school of thought is you write it without limits, as big as possible, because you never know, you might get the funding. My approach on this one, especially, was to write it as big and real as I could, and it still had the human story inside of it: the part where Nuon, the wedding musician, and Sam Nong, Lucky, are traveling away from the bombed out wedding.

That's what happens before the movie starts, in the lead-up to the action. The wedding is bombed out, air strikes are commencing, and they're making their way across the countryside to the safety of the provincial capital, to find his uncle. That's mentioned in both the screenplay and the movie. In the full length feature, Lucky would actually arrive in the provincial capital. As we see in the actual movie, Nuon, the musician, doesn't make it. He's killed by stepping on a landmine.

I've got tons of drafts of the script. Once it was registered with the Writers Guild, the next step was taking it to the Department of Cinema and Cultural Diffusion in Phnom Penh. They have to review it. I had it translated so they could read it, and they read through it. The director at the time, Mr. Sin Chan Saya, liked it, and he wrote me a note, which you can see on the website, that he supports the effort.

That was the first step, write the screenplay I envisioned, then get it translated, which I did. He agreed it was fine, and I was actually surprised, because the Cambodian government is sometimes sensitive about stability with their neighbors, and back in 2012 they were more concerned about stability with Vietnam than Thailand, which is the reverse of the situation now, in 2026, with the border tension flaring up. Back then it was more Vietnam awareness, and I was surprised, they really didn't mind me referring openly to the NVA and Viet Cong being on Cambodian territory. I made no revisions. There's nothing sexy or pornographic in the screenplay anyway, and I didn't make revisions because of the ghost either.

There's a supernatural specter called an ap, or arb, the anglicized spelling, that you can see in Freedom Deal: The Story of Lucky. I was slightly concerned the Department of Cinema, an office of the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts, might object to it, but they didn't, and I'm glad, because it's a folkloric element I included.

The premise of the ap being in this Vietnam war story is roughly this: the conflict, the destruction, the blood, the annihilation of the battlefield attracts these ghosts. In folklore they're attracted to blood, to awful afterbirths, things like that. Here, they're attracted to the destruction and killing on the battlefield. I thought, let me introduce this element, it was kind of an experiment.

Going back further, to 2006, the project had a different name entirely: Breakfast Snack Dinner, named after Operation Menu, the codename for the earlier, secret phase of the bombing campaign. I made a budget for the full feature version that year, I made it out to $248,000. I'm glad I didn't end up making it under that original title, but that was the budget I was working from back then, for the low-budget version of the feature.

I went into it with guns blazing, trying to get the feature done. At a certain point I realized my best approach was probably to make part of this as a standalone short, because holding out for the full budget, all the extras, the background, the crew, the talent, the pyrotechnics, the vehicles, that's a $10 million movie at least, maybe $5 million for a low budget war movie, and I just couldn't get there. So I made the strategic pivot to make Freedom Deal: The Story of Lucky.

I had to modify the beginning slightly. I extracted that section from the full length screenplay and modified it so it made sense with an intro and an outro added. I think the US soldier was in that section originally, and I had to get rid of him, or I chose to.

Funny enough, I was developing this project as far back as 2008, and it started with casting.

I started off with an open call at the Zeppelin Rock Cafe in Phnom Penh, Sunday, May 18th, 3 to 5pm, looking for Westerners who might be able to play some of the military roles. One reason for that was to actually get a database of actors, but also to drum up interest and buzz. People showed up, I put flyers up, and I think it ran in the Cambodia Daily too.

Western actors who thought they fit the description of the main character, the main US Army character, showed up: his name is Shaky Griffith, 19 years old, sort of a semi-redneck, flexible casting, not too old. A lot of them showed up, a fair number, to Zeppelin Cafe.

I've got photos from that. This is back in 2008. I'm sitting there with Vuth, one of the first people I ever met in Cambodia, when I first arrived at the King Guesthouse in 2005. He was a young moto dop, a motorcycle taxi guy, and he took me around to all the English schools, and he became an assistant. This is a very common trajectory for a lot of people who come to Cambodia. You find a decent tuk tuk guy or two, they become part of your posse, and their responsibilities expand. Same with Vuth, he became the casting associate.

In the downtime while we're waiting for people to show up, we're fooling around with the video camera. This was Zeppelin's third location, on Street 51, he moved shops a few times, I think five times over the years. The proprietor, June, is from Taiwan and a rock and roll aficionado. He's got all these vinyl records. So we're sitting there explaining to Vuth what rock and roll is, because he doesn't quite know, and June is saying, listen to this, this is the Ramones, these are the Kinks. I asked, what about Led Zeppelin? He said, oh, don't touch Led Zeppelin. That funny little movie we shot on the side became a film festival short called Vuth Learns to Rock, finished in 2009, I believe.

It went to the Biennale and the Florida Film Festival. It was an accidental pioneer of that whole genre you see on YouTube now, the grandmother, or tribal person, or Native American hearing rock and roll for the first time. We had that happening way back, I just didn't, my mind wasn't there to exploit it, I was thinking in terms of casting. But you can look it up on YouTube, it's called Vuth Learns to Rock. It was shot at that first casting call for Freedom Deal: The Story of Lucky.

After that first casting call, in 2008, then we did CamboFest 2009, the third edition, in Kampot. Around that time I ran into some friction with a Phnom Penh movie venue called the Flicks, which was screening pirated films. They took offense at me and at my projects generally, and the story that went around was that I'd helped block their advertising in the Phnom Penh Post. What actually happened was narrower than that: I knew an IP official from the US government was coming through Phnom Penh, and I mentioned to the Post that running the Flicks' ads alongside that visit probably wasn't a good look. That was the extent of it, but it turned into a whole dust-up.

After all that friction, I decided to go work in Thailand for a while. I went to Bangkok in 2009, after CamboFest, and worked for a friend of mine, helping him restore a film as a forensic editor. I also worked as a co-writer on an animated feature, and I taught directing and documentary at a university there. It was about a year and a half, maybe two years, a good stretch of time. But while I was there, I was still developing Freedom Deal. I was trying to tap into the production infrastructure in Thailand, even thinking maybe we could shoot part of it there.

At some point during that stretch I had a phone conversation with a Hollywood guy named Martin Koblar, I think it was. He was giving free consultations as part of some kind of service, and he told me my next project didn't necessarily have to be Freedom Deal specifically. It just had to be distinctive and attention-grabbing, with an efficient time frame, and I had to have a myopic focus on it. That stuck with me.

I gathered the actors who showed up, we got pictures, created some buzz, and I used that to raise some funds. Somewhere around 2011, I realized I'd developed this thing for three years, and I couldn't get it made. I sent out pitches to Hollywood people, I talked to all the Asian film funds. People might ask, why didn't you go to the Cambodia Film Commission? Well, they have their own agenda, they're essentially a French development agency. I don't think they necessarily welcomed this movie. They didn't outright reject it, but it wasn't exactly aligned with the mandates of the French state, which is a totally different story.

I also applied for a grant from ITVS at one point, never got it, and for a while I was actually thinking about doing this as a documentary instead of a narrative piece. I went to all the film funds in Asia and contacted all the festivals and producers I knew, trying to get the script out there, a normal development process. Anyone who's gone through script development knows they call it development hell. For many projects, it drags on for years, and then the project dies.

In my case, it was, I don't want it to die, but I can't get the money, I have to be practical now, what can I do with this? So I said, let me just do the section. At that point I pivoted, and we ran another notice in the Cambodia Daily or the Phnom Penh Post, I'm not sure, maybe both, and did another casting.

At the Khmer Royale Hotel, I didn't know where else to do it. This was the first wave of this round of casting, the open call, and it was April 28th, 2012.

At this point I'd made the decision to go ahead with the episode version, and hopefully make the whole thing as a series of episodes eventually. People showed up to the casting call. We needed a trokmai player, the musical instrument of Cambodia, and we got a bunch of trokmai players show up. We got background extras, school kids who wanted to act, all kinds. It was an actual open casting call, the kind you might find in a secondary market in America, somewhere like Albuquerque: open call, show up, take pictures. We had lights, had them run through some little scene moments. With the promising actors, we then did callbacks.

For the callbacks, again, we didn't have a place to do them, and there were only seven or eight people for that round. At the casting call itself, we had interest from Dy Saveth, a famous, legendary Cambodian golden age actress, and Tep Rindaro, who's a star here in Cambodia. This is back in 2012. At the time I was still hoping to get the full length screenplay produced, and they said they'd participate if I could get the feature done. Tep Rindaro said he'd play the role of Ramy, Uncle Ramy. Uncle Ramy is the character that, in Freedom Deal: The Story of Lucky, is the uncle they're looking for in the countryside. In the episode version of Story of Lucky, it's just an unnamed uncle they're trying to get to, it still works, it's just different. Dy Saveth would have been one of the relatives in the provincial capital. Certainly not military people.

Then we did the callbacks, and I needed a place for them. I said, why don't you guys show up at the National Museum and we'll do some quick actions and video in the garden. But they kicked us right out. No, you can't do that here. I thought, okay, what are we going to do, plan B. The Phnom Penh post office at the time, in 2012, was much more laid back than it is now, it's since been restored and it's beautiful now. I had a post office box in the main building. The post office box ladies knew I'd go there once a week or so, so when I showed up with these actors and said, we're going to use this space for a minute, do you mind, since the post office box area is generally quiet, there's no one in there, they said okay. I could speak some Khmer then, maybe a little more now than I could at the time. I also had an associate producer with me.

We ran through some action, and I've still got that video, some of it in the behind the scenes footage. That's where we found Sok Polynn, a teacher at the Royal University of Fine Arts, and one of his students was Khoun Darith.

Sok Polynn ended up on the other side of the camera too, not just introducing us to his student. He's the one who plays Nuon, the wedding musician, in the finished film. That's his deal memo you can see on the production book pages, signed for the role.

Darith, in 2013, as you can see in Freedom Deal: The Story of Lucky, is a small, lean, countryside youth. Now he's a grown Royal Theatre actor, and he's famous. I put the old Freedom Deal clips on TikTok for fun, not knowing what would happen, and it took off, people sharing it, liking it. I didn't realize what was happening at first, the comments were like "oh, Darith!" with hearts, love, love. I finally figured it out, wow, he's a star now. But back then, he was emerging. So we gave a break to an emerging talent, and he's definitely famous now in Cambodia.

So then we locked down the two key actors, and that was all I needed to start shooting, since it's basically the two of them making their way across the countryside. In the meantime, I'd look for the military, the Lon Nol military officers, and someone to play the ghost. I was hoping I might find some countryside people to be background extras, and indeed I found them on the spot, in the countryside.

It was very indie. Then I did a fundraiser on IndieGoGo, one of the first fundraisers for an indie film in Cambodia on that platform. I raised about half of the minimum absolute budget I needed, I think about $3,000. One of the guys who pitched in as associate producer, Alec Chesky, an Italian photographer and cinematographer, I'd helped him years before, when he came to shoot some scenes on the old, unrestored Cambodian train going into Battambang station. We'd stayed in touch since, and he popped out of the woodwork and contributed, it was much needed, about $1,500, I think. Every penny of it was used.

One of the logistical challenges I had in mind was that I needed to shoot somewhere close enough to Phnom Penh that we could travel out in the morning and come back at night, otherwise I'd have to pay for hotels. I paid the actors, I think, between $30 and $50 a day, a good rate for them locally, and probably all I could afford. I paid the crew too, the associate producer, and the van driver, who I paid to rent his van and for his time. The budget was being eaten up.

I was looking for a place close enough to get to in the morning, yet that felt like a far away countryside, and that we could still get back from in the evening for the two or three day shoot. I went to all sorts of places and finally found something across the river from Phnom Penh, by Tuol Sambo village, near these lakes that form, these seasonal lakes.

It was in the actual rice fields near these lakes, far enough from major roads that you wouldn't see traffic, and shooting at the right angle, you wouldn't see anything else either, no buildings, no farms, no fences, nothing. I wanted it to feel remote.

If you search Google Maps for "Freedom Deal Crossroads," you'll find it. That's the crossroads where we'd turn east into the rice fields, which you can see, and that's where we shot. In the morning, everyone gets in the van with all the equipment, we cross the river, go to the location, set up, and start shooting.

In terms of equipment, it was me on camera, on a DSLR. I had a jib, I forget exactly where I got it, I think I ordered it from China. In 2012 they didn't have a lot of equipment here, especially not as much as they do now. So I think I ordered the jib, the weights for it, and the fluid head, I'm not totally sure about that part.

Another challenge was that most of the equipment needed to run off batteries, for sound reasons, otherwise the sound is going to suck. I got four or five of these big diffuse paper lanterns with 100 watt bulbs in them, and one or two car batteries that were recharged, I think they were car batteries, rigged with a transformer, so they could power the lights. Two of those batteries were enough to run the lighting for most of a day, and in between shots we'd have to unplug them and plug them back in. I had some LEDs too. There's one shot at dusk where we're almost totally out of light, and the only thing left is one LED from the side, working as moonlight. It was a fairly bright dusk, so it worked.

All the night scenes were shot day for night, filming during the day and color grading it to look like night. Most of the time it's pretty effective: adding a vignette in postproduction, desaturating it, changing the gamma and the brightness, changing the color values, so it looks fairly good as day for night. The color grading on this took a long time.

The actors had the script and were rehearsing, learning their lines. I had the associate producer, and Mister Tol, a key colleague on CamboFest, the Cambodia Film Festival we launched in 2007, Cambodia's first international film festival. Mister Tol was crucial to that. I think I met him around 2007, when he was working at a travel shop where I went to use the internet a lot, since I didn't have cheap internet at home back then. This was before smartphones and 3G. You can ask anybody who was around in 2007, 2008, people were going to internet shops a lot. I'd update websites from there, do research, it was something like 2,000 riel an hour, about 50 cents. He was working at one of these internet shop and travel agency combinations, and that's how I got to know him, for CamboFest. He'd stuck around through other projects since, and now he was working on Freedom Deal, helping with different things.

I was acquiring equipment as the budget allowed: the batteries, the Chinese lanterns, the 100 watt bulbs, the jib. I don't think I actually had a DSLR yet at that point, I bought a Canon Rebel, one of the Rebel series, an APS-C sensor. It was the best I could do, if I'd had more budget I would have gotten full frame. And we needed sound.

This was an interesting challenge. It was before onboard XLR interfaces for DSLR cameras were readily available, this was 2012, 2013. So all the sound was recorded separately, it wasn't onboard sound. I used the onboard sound as a reference, but most of it was recorded on a Tascam, I forget which model, a pretty high resolution 4 or 8 track external recorder. I had to buy that recorder. This was probably even before Zoom recorders became the standard. You can obviously get dedicated audio field recorders if you have the budget, but I didn't have the budget. I got the best portable field recorder I could.

Then, what do you do about a blimp? I needed a blimp, a windscreen cage for the mic. They didn't have any back then in Phnom Penh. I had a regular directional video mic, but out there in the rice fields you've got a lot of wind, and a foam cover wasn't going to cut it. I needed an actual cage, a big windscreen with a fuzzy cover on it, and they didn't have any, so I built one. I spent one or two evenings cutting chicken wire into a giant cylinder to encase the microphone, then bought a fuzzy women's jacket at a thrift store, a fake fur jacket, cut it apart, and stuck it on the outside of the cage. There are pictures of it, that's the homemade blimp.

I had to research mine injuries, for the scene where Nuon steps on a landmine, hopefully you've seen the movie so I won't spoil it too much. I decided it's a 100 gram TNT anti-personnel mine, the kind the Khmer Rouge would use, so I had to research how much damage that would actually do. It would blow your foot off.

I researched it, got photos of that kind of injury, and we got a cow bone, fake blood, and cut his pants so they'd shred. So it looked like his actual leg was down in a hole in the ground, and the cow bone stuck out as his shin, we had to smash the bone to make it look like the remnants of the injury. There was a lot of preparation like that. I had to gather all these materials in advance, because once we're shooting, there's nothing we can do, we have to shoot.

For the ghost itself, before we ever got to building it, Ratha and I went out into the countryside and talked to people, including some monks, who claimed to have actually seen ghosts. We brought colored pencils and had them draw what they'd seen. There's a great one from a woman named Mrs. Moo, a ghost shaped just like a circle with a round tail. That research fed straight into how the ap ended up looking in the finished film.

I also storyboarded most of it before we shot a frame. Not polished artwork, fairly rough, some of it just stick figures, but a lot of it more like shapes with arrows pointing in key directions. I storyboarded the frog scene, the Jeep scene, sequences like that, worked out in advance so we weren't figuring it out on the day.

So I had the blimp, the sound, the camera, rechargeable batteries for everything, the Chinese lanterns, the jib, the van, the actors. The actor needed a trokmai, but he didn't know how to play it, so I bought one and lent it to him, told him to see what he could do, play around with it, try to pretend. At first he wasn't confident he could do it. The trokmai you actually hear in the movie is a professional player, and that audio is layered over the actor's own performance of the movements.

I needed to make potassium nitrate smoke cookies, homemade smoke cookies. You can find the ingredients online, I think it's baking soda, potassium nitrate, and something else. I needed the smoke for the aftermath of the mine going off. Details like that. I spent an evening making smoke cookies. I had to find the potassium nitrate powder in Phnom Penh, blend it with the other ingredients, I forget exactly what they were, then make the cookies and dry them out, have them ready.

All of this is preproduction, the ghost is a postproduction thing. All of this acquiring materials and paying people used up every penny of the budget. It was a two or three day shoot. I forgot to mention the permits.

It was about August by the time we were getting ready to shoot. At the time, and it's still the case, the Cambodia Film Commission was basically a production services entity, set up by France Audiovisuel, UniFrance, and Film France. They get permits for producers, and they charged a fee for it, at least at the time. I didn't quite like that, and there were a couple of reasons. They never quite embraced what I was doing. I don't know if it was because I wasn't one of their stakeholders, or maybe because of some history with CamboFest not being especially friendly with them, that's another story.

As a result, I was disinclined to use them for the permit process. Across the street was, and still is, the actual Cambodian government office, the Department of Cinema and Cultural Diffusion, an office of the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts. That's the pre-existing, long standing office where producers should go, or can go, to get permits. It's like a retro, no-frills government office. The Cambodia Film Commission, which is a European project, set up their office right across the street from it. You can debate the purpose of that, what their aim was, and some argue it was because they wanted to catch producer traffic, people going, instead of the Cambodian government office, to the Cambodia Film Commission instead.

In any case, Cedric Eloy was the head of the Cambodia Film Commission at the time. I'd talked to him briefly about him helping get permits, but I didn't quite trust his ability to do it promptly, especially given the existing track record. So I opted for the Cambodian government's Department of Cinema and Cultural Diffusion, headed at the time by Sin Chan Saya, who had always been supportive of CamboFest anyway. That was the reason I went with them.

I figured Cedric and the Cambodia Film Commission were capable of getting permits, but first, I didn't want to pay, and second, I didn't want to run into the heart of rainy season and risk delaying the shoot. It's an indie shoot, everyone's blocking out two to three days out of a busy schedule, and it's hard to re-block that time for eight or ten people. I really wanted to make sure it ran on schedule, so I opted for the government office, and I stand by that.

The ironic thing is, after the film was completed, some time passed, and in 2019, the Cambodia Film Commission featured our movie on their Made in Cambodia film page. I don't know if they were presenting it as though they'd been part of the process. They weren't, they weren't involved at all. It was strictly a Department of Cinema and Cultural Diffusion effort. That's who approved and reviewed the script, that's who we got the permits from, and that's who reviewed the final edit. When you finish the movie, you have to give it back to them and show them, here's the final movie, so it can be shared and released in Cambodia.

I avoided friction with the Cambodia Film Commission by going straight to the local office, and honestly, I prefer to support local entities anyway. Even if the Cambodia Film Commission had been American, I'd probably still have gone to the actual Cambodian government office.

So that's preproduction: everything set, the van, the locations scouted. I'm out scouting locations with a tripod, getting shots and doing some time lapse photography.

One time I'm riding back on the motorcycle from this remote location, and two police officers stop me and ask what I've got there. They thought I had a rifle in the tripod case. I showed them, tripod legs, camera legs, and they explained that some of the village guys thought I might be going to shoot their buffalo. No, no, no, no.

Needless to say, the point is you have to get permits. If you try to shoot without them, everybody in the villages, the village chief, they all know each other, there are plenty of eyes on the ground, and eventually someone will come around and ask to see your permission. It's not like the US, where you can steal a shot on the subway, and at worst, someone tells you to leave. In Cambodia, you might have to go with the police and explain what you're doing, and they can shut down your production. You have to go through the government, you have to get their permission, unless you're shooting something like a personal documentary at home, and it's arguable you'd even need permission for that.

If you shot something anti-government, or extremely controversial, or something like a porno in your apartment, obviously you wouldn't seek permission for that, but if word got out, if the neighbors noticed people coming and going every day, eventually someone would be alerted. They'll find out, and there'll be consequences.

My point is, it's a different kind of awareness here, much more like a living social network, a living Facebook. People will show up wearing an undershirt and khaki trousers, a small walkie-talkie on their belt, that's the police. Or some guy in a flannel shirt on a beat up motorcycle, could be a soldier. It's the land of the plainclothes power node.

That was preproduction.

Once we're actually shooting, it's pretty straightforward, honestly. Most of the real effort was pre-production. We shot it all in three days, August 2012, and then did some pickup shots with Ratha for the shoe insert and some time-lapse B-roll on a fourth or fifth day.

I've still got the shot list and the schedule, and going back through them now, they're actually very well organized, more than I remembered. First page is a normal script section, I had a standard format I used. Shot one, scene number, shot type, description, all laid out very carefully, using techniques from NYU film school, but honestly, it's also just common sense once you've done it a few times. Jib or tripod, tripod for speed, tripod handheld. Actually, I didn't end up doing much handheld. There's one shot on the list, shot three, handheld on the hood, through the windshield while driving, sound rolling wild inside. We didn't get that shot, it only had two Y's next to it, my own notation, low priority. The other shots that mattered were marked Y Y Y, bold, with an asterisk. We got the main shots and let the rest go, icing on the cake we didn't have time for. That's just how it is in filmmaking.

There's a schedule too: August 12th, 2012, scene, setup number one, the Jeep and the Lon Nol soldiers, Jeep establishing shots, audio dialogue, setup three, forty-five minutes for lunch, end of day. My own organization on this surprises me a little, looking back. We were also trying to beat the rain, it was already rainy season by early August, and peak rainy season starts to hit around the middle of the month, in my experience.

Power was a real consideration too, worth its own note in the production book: deciding on a power source, keeping things charged. We were charging the small batteries in the van while we were out shooting, and some of the fluorescents could just run on double A's.

Ratha was with me the whole shoot as associate producer, doubling as sound recordist, and Mister Tol, who I'd known since the early CamboFest days back in 2007, came on as co-director and associate producer as well. For lunch, forty-five minutes, I think Sambot, who was driving, went off and got noodles or snacks. Mostly, honestly, we used the break to sleep. It was very hot, I remember that clearly.

I wasn't even sure we'd be able to rent the Jeep for a while. Sok Cheat was going to let me know. I had to allocate my time carefully around that uncertainty: if I didn't write the scene at all and the Jeep suddenly became available, I'd have had to stay up all night writing it. So I sketched the scene out in advance, then got word that yes, he could bring the Jeep the next day, and we were shooting it tomorrow. I went ahead and finished writing the actual dialogue the night before. I'm the writer and the director of that movie, so all of it is mine, with some on-the-spot corrections here or there once we were shooting.

There's a funny anecdote about the scene itself. Sok Cheat owned the Jeep, and it looked pretty period, pretty good. I just had to find a military jacket that looked close enough to a Lon Nol jacket, and the fatigues. I finally found them. Honestly, I don't even remember how I first got in touch with him, he was just the Jeep guy initially, and he ended up being an actor.

Originally, Sok Cheat was the driver of the Jeep, since he owned it, and the driver doesn't have many lines, as you can see in the finished film. But we were pretty limited on time, maybe four hours, no, three hours, to shoot the whole Jeep scene before we had to move on to the rest of the afternoon. We started shooting with Sok Cheat as the driver and the other guy as the Lon Nol officer in the passenger seat. But the other fellow kept forgetting his lines. Sok Cheat, sitting right next to him, kept mumbling the officer's lines along with him, like he already knew them. So reaching this critical deadline, I said, okay, we're going to switch you. Sok Cheat, you're the officer now, and the other guy's the driver. It went over fine. You can see him in the movie, that's Sok Cheat, and he was originally supposed to be the driver.

The refugees you see fleeing through the countryside, we just found them near the location and asked if they wanted to be in the movie, and told them what to do. There's a main body of five guys behind, and the bicycle man out in front, Chum Samet. We said, okay, you guys stay separate, you're fleeing the fighting. Chum Samet was pretty convincing, actually, for someone who'd never acted before that afternoon. We paid them, I think ten dollars each, for about an hour.

The ap in Cambodian folklore is a woman's head, floating, with her guts dragging beneath it, no body at all. In the reality of the story, she's a woman from the village, a widow or a spinster, someone unlucky, and at night her head detaches and pulls free of her body, carrying all those guts along with it. I wanted to get that right on screen, and it was hard to find a woman who wanted to play the ghost at all, since the role is considered unlucky, but my sweetheart at the time, Ron, who unfortunately passed away last year, helped me out. I paid her for it, of course. It was her head matched against the actual real guts of a pig.

Mister Tol, who was co-director and associate producer on the film and was in the Cambodian Navy at the time, said he'd ask around at the Navy mess hall about getting a carcass, the innards of a pig, and ended up going to a pig farm instead. I paid for it, something like twenty-five to thirty-five dollars, for the whole set, the trachea, the lungs, the heart, and some of the guts.

We kept it all in my refrigerator, and I built a green screen in the middle room of my apartment, green screen paint on posterboard, and suspended the pig carcass against it. I put a plastic tube into the trachea and another into the heart. I'm standing on one side, camera running on the tripod, Mister Tol on the other side pumping a rubber photography bulb to get the heart pumping, and I'm pumping another bulb to make the lungs breathe. This was a real pig carcass. Somebody else was dribbling fake blood, sugar and corn syrup and dye, onto the whole thing while we shot it. It looked disgusting, genuinely disgusting, which is exactly what we needed. Once we had all the shots, Mister Tol rinsed the blood off, took it back to the Navy base, and they put it in a stew and ate it.

That was the guts. The head was a separate piece of the puzzle: I found, miraculously, a full-length nightshirt that was already green screen green, and cut randomized triangles into the collar. If you know how green screen works, Ron's body largely disappears against it except for these frills of neck in a ragged triangular shape. It worked pretty well.

I sent all the clips off to Michael Martin in Canada, a visual effects guy, working cheaply or for free, I forget which, but he did a great job compositing it together. I got the layers back and had to manually tweak them myself in the editing process as well. So when you see the guts hanging down in the movie, that's the actual pig guts Mister Tol got, first through the Navy mess hall inquiry and then from the butcher, and then took back to his Navy base afterward to be eaten.

There's a scene where Lucky and Nuon are famished after walking all day and catch a big fat bullfrog to eat. They're about to light a fire, and then realize they can't, someone will see it. That's based on the reality of the time: Huey gunships, when they spotted a fire of any kind, would just shoot at it, since it read as an enemy encampment.

For production, we had three live frogs, frog actors. You can actually notice a fishing line on one of the shots, tied to a leg and then to a twig, so it couldn't jump away, or if it did, we could regather it. We'd only got the three, we couldn't afford to lose one.

The live frog shots are genuinely live. But in the scene, Nuon and Lucky have to eat the frog raw, since they can't risk a fire, tearing the limbs off and chewing on them. An actual live, uncooked frog is very tough, hard to pull apart without a knife, so what they're eating on camera is semi-cooked, steamed just enough to soften it. The last one they're shown finishing was fully cooked. The actors didn't really complain, they'd agreed to do it, and they could see the frog was cooked, frog is a normal food in Cambodia and across Asia, so it wasn't some extremely bizarre ask. But it wasn't like they had to act very hard to seem reluctant either, I don't think they were that hungry or thrilled to eat it in reality. They still sold it as if they were starving, and it came off pretty convincing.

The script called for Samnang to have dug a shallow grave, with Nuon still breathing in it, barely. On location, we couldn't actually dig a grave for him that quickly and easily, so it became a mutual idea on set: have Samnang gather branches and cover him with those instead. It actually worked better anyway, since you could still see his face and his head looking out from the pile of branches. It made sense, and it worked.

For the leg itself, we bought a cow bone, shattered off the bottom knob, I think it was the front shin of a cow, from the knee down, real bone. We sprinkled it with fake blood, dug a hole, and had Nuon lie down after the blast with his leg extended into it, so the cow bone stuck out as if it were his own shattered leg, matched against his other, undamaged one. We didn't dwell on the shot too long, lingering on it too much risked revealing it was fake, but it was enough. There's a slider close-up along the cow bone the next morning, after they've slept, when Lucky, who's kind of forgotten what happened overnight, sees the smashed leg and is taken aback all over again. That's a real close, slow slider shot along the bone. The smoke in the background there is from the smoke cookies I'd made in advance, used to create a bit of haze rather than a big dramatic plume, and it worked well enough.

I had a different location picked out originally for this scene entirely. When we arrived on set that morning, it had rained the night before, and the original spot was mired and mushy, unusable. I said, okay, fan out, take fifteen minutes, look for a backup. One of us found what became the final location, this round tunnel of trees. It's a spot where water buffalo actually walk through the local vegetation, and it forms a kind of natural tunnel as they cut the same trail through the hedge over and over. I was never totally clear on how it formed, but that's apparently what it is, and it looked really cool on camera. I think the reason it worked when the other spot didn't was just higher ground, the original choice was lower and got mushy from the rain, and this one hadn't.

There's a shot where you can spot a continuity error if you look closely: Sok Polynn, playing Nuon, starts a scene wearing shoes and finishes it in sandals. I realized it going through footage, oh shit, we've got a continuity error, we have to just script this. I asked him if we could just come back out to the countryside for half a day to reshoot it, and he said, no, he couldn't do it unless there was a full day's pay, which is fair, but the budget was so tight. I was thinking of ways not to do it.

So instead, I wrote around it. We got Sok Polynn's shirt, and Ratha, the associate producer, put it on so we'd just see his arms on camera, reaching in and taking someone's sandals from the pond bank and replacing them with his shoes. So it's as if he stole or traded shoes with somebody, because in the story his character's feet are aching, they've been walking so far. I just motivated or justified it with the trade of the shoes. That was basically because I didn't want to pay forty dollars just to do that scene. I know that sounds cheap, but we were really low on money.

There's exactly one stock clip in the whole film. It's the sunset, the shot where the sun is setting while Lucky and Nuon are by the pond. We needed it for the script, but I just couldn't get a real sunset out there that was satisfactory, so that one shot is the exception to everything else in the movie being shot practically on location.

Like I said, during production you bring your production binder and make sure you have your permissions with you. At one point, on the third day, local police guys showed up and asked what we were doing. We showed them the permission from the Department of Cinema. Once they see the stamp from the ministry, everything is quite okay.

I kept every receipt from this shoot, and going back through them recently was its own strange trip. Cloth tape. Something for eighty dollars, a twelve-volt battery. Transcend micro SD cards. A cleaning kit for the cameras, twenty-five dollars for something else. Thirty-five dollars I gave Ratha for helping me go out to the countryside and do research. Another thirty dollars for something. Rechargeable batteries, Sony AA blister packs, those were key, twenty-four dollars here, twenty-eight for more, another four, another thirty, fifteen for a charger, something for twelve fifty, a Panasonic something or other. Twenty-six seventy-five for casting expenses. Fifteen dollars for something. A hundred and ten dollars for translating the screenplay, that one's a whole story on its own. Small amounts for tools, two dollars, another ten, another eight. And two hundred ninety-two dollars for a month's rent above Billy Gallery, number 69, Street 178, which I used as a production office that month and saved the receipt for, not that I could write it off against anything.

Actors were paid around forty dollars a day, which was fair for an indie shoot in Cambodia at the time. By the end I'd gone through the entire budget I'd raised on IndieGoGo, there was nothing left. Once we wrapped, anything I could sell to recoup some of the money, I did: the Tascam, the Chinese lanterns, the bulbs, the jib, even the camera, sold it as nearly new to cover a month's rent while I was editing. Nearly everything went.

I just kept the habit of holding on to receipts. On a budget this tight, you end up knowing exactly where every dollar went, because there wasn't a version of this production where you could afford not to.

Going back through the project files now, it was edited on Premiere Pro, on a Windows laptop, not Final Cut Pro like I first thought, that confusion is understandable thirteen years later. The final project file is literally named "Super Mongo final," dated June 22nd, 2013. It was nearly a year after shooting that the movie was actually done.

We shot on HD rather than 4K, which is probably why it didn't take up too much hard drive space and was fairly easy to edit, I didn't need to upgrade the machine. I think I only had about sixteen gigs of RAM at the time. Total footage must have been somewhere around 50 to 100 gigabytes.

I finished the main edit in June of 2013. I was slated to go to work at the American Center in Burma that July, teaching English, and I knew it would disrupt my life, so I had to get the edit done first. We'd shot in August, and the editing, the mix, the composition, the mastering, the final festival files, all of it was finished by the end of that June. From there it was a matter of making the press kits and the materials, and I was already out in Burma by the time most of that got done.

Once I was in Burma, internet access was really limited. The American Center had one standard station connecting to the outside internet, and the rest was the internal embassy network, which I couldn't use for this. So I was working full time, and on Saturdays, at least one day of the weekend, I could come in and work all day distributing Freedom Deal, sitting there at the American Center, part of the US Embassy, sending this supernatural Vietnam War horror film out to try to get it into festivals.

Somewhere in there I also showed the rough cut to my students at Cam Ed, the business school in Phnom Penh where I was still teaching at the time. They wrote up their reactions, and the feedback was largely positive, a useful check before locking anything.

Color correction was a big deal in this movie, since we shot day for night. Every night scene was shot during the day except one, a reverse shot looking out over the pond near the end, which is actually real dusk, we needed at least one genuine dusk shot to make the day-for-night illusion feel authentic. For the day-for-night shots, I'd expose around normal or maybe a half stop under, then pull it down further in post, push the blues up, and add a vignette. Going through my old change notes, there are entries like adding black solid clips to adjust opacity for the night scenes, and small tweaks like adding more color into the treetops while the Huey passes overhead.

The overall look is a deliberately desaturated, sepia-leaning treatment, meant to suggest a 16mm period feel. That took a lot of trial and error to land on, done in Boris Effects, before Lumetri became the standard color tool bundled with Premiere.

Michael Martin, the visual effects artist in Canada, composited the ghost footage and also worked on the smoke for the opening sequence's helicopters and explosions. I had to tweak the helicopters myself after getting the layers back, distant helicopters are hard to get right, too fast and they don't read as real, too mechanical and they don't either, and it can't be jerky. Took a lot of trial and error. It's the best I could do, and I think it looks okay.

There's also a slider I used for a few shots, including the close-up on the shattered landmine leg, a standard slider with half-centimeter markings on it, so I could do manual time-lapse: move it half a centimeter, take a shot, move it again, take another. A couple of the moving shots in the film were done that way.

The score was composed by Mi-hoon Kim, a Korean composer, and she did a great job, the music is compelling, very cinematic, and you can hear it doing real work when you watch the film. The whole thing was post-produced across 2012 and 2013, before the AI generation of tools existed at all.

Sound was recorded externally on the Tascam recorder throughout, with Ratha doubling as sound recordist on top of his associate producer role, and the camera's own internal audio used only as a reference track. Matching that external sound to picture in the edit, on top of the helicopter effects and the rest of the mix, was a lot of work on its own. I remember using PluralEyes at some point to help with syncing, though going back through it now I'm honestly not entirely sure how I used it.

Once the edit was finished, I had to bring a DVD of the final movie back to the Department of Cinema, the same office that reviewed the script, so they could confirm we'd stuck to what was approved. They watched it and signed off, which is what actually clears a film for release inside Cambodia.

Before streaming was big, VCDs, video compact discs, were still really popular in the countryside, so I made a special VCD version, a couple hundred of them, and gave them out in person to people out where we'd shot. I've got photos of people genuinely excited to receive their copy. I made DVDs too, though this one was always a little harder to market than my other projects, being 24 minutes and not a feature, back before platforms existed to make that less of an obstacle.

I submitted the film to 27 festivals through FilmFreeway, plus a number of others outside that platform. It was accepted at exactly one, the Highway 61 Film Festival. Honestly, I'm not sure why the rest passed, it could be the quality, the strangeness of it, the niche aspect, there are a lot of possible reasons. One festival that passed on it still wrote back to say it was intriguing and that they'd spent a lot of time discussing it, which was something, even without an acceptance.

The Library Journal had loved BookWars and recommended Lost in New Mexico, calling it challenging. When I sent them Freedom Deal, they went quiet. The reaction from Western programmers generally was strange, they'd never seen anything quite like this disembodied ghost head floating through a war story, and it seemed to disconcert some of them. Cleveland Film Festival's notes were the most telling: interesting, they said, the way it juxtaposes psychedelic horror with a historical setting, but they were candid that the effects didn't read as big-budget. Someone could counter that the fix was simply to raise more money. Maybe that's fair, but the IndieGoGo campaign was the fundraiser we had, and we did what a crowdfunding effort like that could realistically do, that kind of campaign takes a real amount of work on its own to run. Either way, Cleveland was seeing exactly what we had to work with.

New Filmmakers showed it too, with an introduction from Barney Oldfield, and it also played at a military-history festival in Poland. The festival push effectively ended October 1st, 2016, at the Big Sur Film Festival. That's when I decided to stop submitting and shift to self-distribution instead. The film's own website still gets steady traffic, actually, I checked the analytics recently, thirteen years later, in 2026, and people are still visiting it regularly.

After the festival push ended, the film went quiet for a while. I had the website and the materials up, but I wasn't making money off it. I put clips on YouTube, including the ghost reveal, which some people really liked, it's picked up around 350,000 views on its own. I'd more or less concluded it wasn't really a festival film, more something between a niche Asian genre picture and a streaming-only title, though I'm still not entirely sure how to describe it.

It stayed dormant for years after that. Part of it was that I'd mentally moved on, it had been such a tremendous effort. Then COVID hit, and I was preoccupied with just making a living, trying to get my business going, all of that. As covered in the permits story in the Pre-Production section, the Cambodia Film Commission listed the film on its program in 2019 without having been involved in making it. My own website work on it stayed unfinished until I picked it back up in 2023.

I'll admit, watching a project you put your heart and soul into just quietly die is genuinely depressing. There was a stretch where it made me want to take every hard drive I had and throw them in the Mekong River, just to be free of the whole thing. That's the drag effect of it. What actually helps is moving on to other projects and letting time do its own thing, since it might become relevant again. My advice to anyone in the same position: if your movie seems to be dying out or entering a long-tail phase, don't throw anything away. Keep it organized, back it up, and move on. In a decade or so, it might come back around, the way BookWars did, my first documentary, which had its initial run, died out by around 2005, and didn't come back until roughly 2020, when it became something more like a time capsule, and started getting more attention than it ever had on release.

That's more or less what happened here too. In 2023, the film got onto FilmHub, and from there onto a couple of niche streaming channels and an Amazon Prime compilation. Then in 2024, after the FilmHub push, I put clips on Instagram, and it started blowing up, I honestly couldn't figure out why at first. It turned out Cambodian audiences were recognizing Khoun Darith, credited as Lucky, the kid from the movie. He's a well-known Royal Theatre performer now, with several hundred thousand followers of his own. I haven't met up with him personally, we tried to catch one of his shows once and just ran out of time, though Ratha did reach out to him, maybe we'll connect at some point.

It just goes to show you never really know. An actor in a small movie can end up famous and lift the whole project along with them, or a line in the script ends up taking on new relevance years later, and you can't predict either one. Thirteen years after finishing it, the film is getting more attention than it ever did on release. I think it's worth relating the actual process of making this movie precisely because it was so unlike anything else I've done. I think of it now as an artifact of a specific stretch of independent filmmaking in Cambodia, roughly 2008 to 2015.