Editor’s Pitch

What would you do for your child? How much is their need greater than your own? These are the big questions lying beneath the surface of this concise and affecting story. Avoiding sentimentality and breezing through the horrors of Cambodian history with stylish animation disarmingly narrated by a child, this is a quiet story about passionate people making a difference because they can be bothered to care.


“Collateral damage” is the military term for civilian casualties during wartime operations. But sometimes the results of war can be further reaching and ultimately more damaging than the loss of life in the direct aftermath.

35 years ago the Khmer Rouge took control of Cambodia in the social ruins left by the United States’ bombing of the country during the Vietnam War. In just under four years of rule, the Communist Party of Kampuchea wiped out 30% of Cambodia’s people through executions, lack of medical care and torture, leaving behind a legacy of corruption, illiteracy, and widespread poverty.

Today, it is the children who bear the brunt of this legacy.

Directors Laren and Marissa Sandler’s Keeping Them Safe is a short but highly effective snapshot of the great work which NGOs perform in Cambodia to combat child sexual trafficking. Following the work of the Sunrise Orphanage Centre, the directors concentrate on two children’s experiences and the difficult choices their parents have made to help ensure a better future for their family.

Raksa is the daughter of Sopheak, a mother who is forced to work in a Karaoke bar to support her child, a bar where sexual abuse is rife. With no education and little money, she cannot offer Raksa a rich environment to learn in or to feel safe. If Sopheak allows the orphanage to take Raksa, she will only be able to visit her daughter, losing most of parental rights. Meanwhile, four year old Thiem is a dwarf, trafficked from Thailand and already at the orphanage. Out of the blue an adult dwarf claiming to be Thiem’s father arrives at the orphanage demanding his son back.

Featuring an intimate filming style along with broad but affecting social and emotional realities, Keeping Them Safe is a surprisingly powerful testament to the love strangers can give to one another and how cycles of suffering can ultimately be broken.