AllMovie

Filmmaker Socheata Poeuv sets out to reclaim her family's past by traveling to Cambodia and unraveling the mystery surrounding their escape from the genocidal campaign of the Khmer Rouge in this documentary tracing an emotional journey and exploring long-buried family secrets. Poev was born in a Cambodian refugee camp on New Year's Day, and her family always called her "the lucky one." It seemed something of a miracle that her parents survived the brutal genocide that claimed some 1.7 million lives, and after escaping to Thailand they relocated the entire family to Texas in hopes of starting a new life. It was Christmas day of 2002 when Poev's world - at least as she knew it - came crumbling down. Her parents gathered the family around in order to reveal the secrets that they had so closely guarded for a quarter of a century: the girls Poev thought to be her older sisters were actually her cousins, and the boy she thought to be her brother was actually her half-brother - the product of her mother's previous marriage. The information had changed the way Poev perceived her life, and her determination to uncover any other family secrets led her all the way back to Cambodia. Retracing her family's path along with her parents, Poev attempts to piece together her fractured family history in order to better-understand the big picture. In order to understand the truth about her family, however, Poev will have to come to terms with Cambodia's grim history. As Poev and her parents return to the concentration camp where her family was nearly destroyed, long-buried secrets rise to the surface and a tale of love forged under the cruelest conditions imaginable leads her to reevaluate her entire life.