Nerakhoon (The Betrayal), cinematographer Ellen Kuras‘ documentary directorial debut, was recently named to the Academy’s short list of potential Best Documentary nominees, and it’s certainly deserving. A film over wo decades in the making, its back-story is fairly remarkable. Kuras met her subject, Thavisouk Phrasavath, while looking for a Laotian translator for a film she planned to direct about a family from Laos then living in Rochester, NY, but then became so interested in her potential translator’s own refugee story that she turned the camera on him instead.

Kuras went on to essentially became a master at her day job accidentally; as she told indieWIRE when the film debuted at Sundance, she started her career as an “an associate producer, an assistant cameraperson on docs, and as an electrician on dramatic films (so that I could learn how to light),” and then as production on Nerakhoon continued on, she found herself “needing to take on other projects in order to pay for it.” Those jobs included shooting commercials directed by people like Spike Lee, and eventually films like I Shot Andy Warhol, Blow, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. And yet The Betrayal remained a resolutely independent, low-to-the-ground personal project. Phrasavath, called “Thavi” on screen, is billed as co-director and editor, and often functioned as Kuras’ only other crew member, acting as “translator, cohort and production assistant.” Together he and Kuras combine freshly-shot 16mm material with archival footage, home video, and what look like ancient home movies into a collage of overlapping images. It’s an approach that fits the film perfectly: this world-class camerawoman has made a handmade document of a global-political story concentrated down into a single, extraordinarily intimate portrait, in which the “bigger” issues are mirrored but ultimately dwarfed by domestic tragedy.

…Read more