Sentenced Home A feature-length documentary by David Grabias and Nicole Newnham PRESS RELEASE Thursday August 3, 2006 8:30 - Live Music by mushroom cloud -x 9:00 - Showtime TRT: 1:15:50 On the roof of Downtown Community Television (DCTV) | DIRECTIONS 87 Lafayette, 2 blocks below Canal btwn Walker & White, Tribeca, Manhattan Sentenced Home When Loeun Lun was just a baby, his family fled Cambodia and the Kmher Rouge and gained asylum in America. They settled in inner-city Seattle, and were given little in the way of employment assistance, language training, or guidance on becoming American citizens. Growing up in a dangerous and desperate neighborhood, Loeun, like many teenagers in his community, got into trouble: he fired a gun in a shopping mall to stop a rival gang attack. After a brief stint in jail, he straightened out. By the time he reached his mid-twenties, Loeun had a well-paying job, supporting a wife and two young children. After September 11th, his wife encouraged him to upgrade his legal status from permanent resident alien to full-fledged U.S. citizen. And that's when the Department of Homeland Security told him he was being deported. Over 1,400 Cambodian-Americans are currently being forcibly deported back to Cambodia. Raised as Americans in America, they are being sent into exile to a distant homeland they never really knew—a homeland that starved, tortured, and murdered their families. Sentenced Home is their story. This feature-length documentary tells the heart-breaking personal sagas of the deportees, following several characters? stories full-circle: from birth in Cambodia to their unwilling return decades later. The feature will be preceded by one short film: Fat Cake (Leslie Dektor | Soweto, South Africa | 25:00) "What happens to a man if he is denied the ability to express himself? There is a let out." For a shy young black man named Lemmy, living under Apartheid, solace lets itself out through the saxophone. His tender-hearted father says he was tapped at early age to be a lawyer or a minister. Instead, Lemmy takes on the name "Sparks Nyeme," and records a successful album. But the system being what it is, Lemmy reaps none of the benefits of his recording, and continues to live in poverty, playing unchallenging popular hits for white audiences in exchange for a little "sugar." This beautiful portrait was filmed in 1978, but when one of the participants was jailed, filmmaker Dektor held off editing until 2006.