"Crushed like Garlic": Cambodian Sex Slavery

"Paper Cannot Wrap Up Embers" tells the story of seven young women forced to sell their bodies in Phnom Penh so they can help support their impoverished families in the country.

"The dead are quiet and the living suffer," says one of the women , whose life Rithy Pahn follows. The depiction of women who are exploited as sex slaves in contemporary Cambodian society, which still bears the scars of the Khmer Rouge's regime is very intimate and moving. Panh has said his film is "as close as one can get to the life -- and thus spiritual death -- of a prostitute".

The UN estimates there are 30,000 prostitutes in Cambodia. There are also countless numbers of Cambodian prostitutes in Thailand and Malaysia. Pahn portrays their daily existences and listens to their views. He is not interested in the sleazy underworld of the red light district but depicts the ordinary aspects of the women's lives.

The viewers get to know the women as they cook, eat, argue, do the accounts, shoot up, cry and they listen to them talk. They talk about the customers: "They get laid and hit us like animals," says one. "We get exploited and crushed like garlic," explains another.

Sold into sex slavery

They talk about how they got into prostitution. Some were sold into slavery by their parents, others were abandoned as children, others made their way to the capital to find work. One woman says she is too old and can only get "tricks" from rickshaw drivers -- she explains her husband doesn't help her and she needs to work so he can eat his rice. Her two-year-old son was stolen from her.

It turns out she's only 34 and has been working as a prostitute for nine years. Another was raped by her father... The individual reasons are numerous, but collectively it is clear that the Khmer Rouge also has a large part of responsibility.

The bitter memories of its brutal reign are omnipresent. Many of the women grew up in UN refugee camps and did not have access to education. Lack of qualifications drove them to prostitution. One mother tells her daughter who complains about having to work as a sex slave for a kilo of rice that she has it easy: "Under the Khmer Rouge it was much worse, there was no food and executions; we had to share watered-down soup." At least you can eat is the implication.

Driven to despair

And although the survival skills honed under the Khmer Rouge continue to be used in the contemporary era, many of the young women are almost driven to despair -- suicide and death are a recurring theme. The women talk about the violence of their customers -- they all know stories of women who have literally been battered to death. "If we die, nobody cares," one says matter-of-factly.

AIDS is also a common cause of death among the prostitutes who discuss the disease's origin -- monkeys and UN peacekeepers are but two possibilities... A woman says the "bastard white men" who have sex without condoms are not afraid to die. Her friend answers indifferently: "If you have AIDS you die, if you don't you die too."

This is an indication that, emotionally, she already feels dead and this feeling is shared by many others: "Lying down on a bed is like lying on the butcher's block," one states. Another: "When a client has sex with me, he has sex with a dead girl."

Rithy Pahn thus continues his exploration of death and brutality in Cambodian society, depicting the lives of women who, despite all their bitterness and anger, at times laugh and sing, finding refuge in painting or poetry and doing their best to get through their suffering so long as they are still alive.