enemies

Filmmaker Rob Lemkin’s most famous relative is the late Raphael Lemkin, a Polish attorney who spent his life crusading against mass murder and who invented the term “genocide” to describe what the Nazis had done to the Jews, including 40 members of his family. Rob Lemkin never knew Raphael Lemkin, a distant cousin who died before Rob was born. But the elder Lemkin’s legacy has motivated much of the filmmaker’s work, notably his documentary “Enemies of the People,” an exposé on the Cambodian genocide that claimed two-million lives during the Pol Pot regime of the 1970s. Co-authored with Teth Sambath, the groundbreaking film – which culminates with a confession by Pol Pot’s second-in-command, Nuon Chea – is short-listed for the Academy Award and has received a Writers Guild Award nomination.