Leading cinematographer Ellen Kuras and Laotian immigrant Thavisouk Phrasavath spent 23 years bringing The Betrayal (Nerakhoon) to screen.

From the villages of Laos to the slums of New York, politics is intensely personal for the war-ravaged family at the center of this passionate directorial debut. In 1984, Ellen Kuras met Thavisouk (“Thavi”) Phrasavath. She was a budding filmmaker, hoping to find a tutor in the Lao language. He had been a political refugee for two years at that point, struggling with the American challenges of paying rent, buying food and holding onto the values of his homeland.
When Kuras started filming Phrasavath, his mother and younger siblings, neither imagined that it would be the beginning of an over two-decade-long friendship, partnership and journey.
The result is The Betrayal (Nerakhoon), a memoir and documentary nominated for the grand jury prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.
It recounts the Phrasavath family’s flight from Laos, after violence spilled over from the U.S.’s clandestine operations during the Vietnam War.
Because Phrasavath’s father had previously worked for the CIA, the family faced harsh persecution when the communist movement Pathet Lao came to power in 1975. The second half of the film explores the Phrasavaths’ years in exile in Brooklyn, N.Y., and how war continued to color their lives.
For Kuras, finding time for The Betrayal in the midst of a busy day job—as a cinematographer to top directors such as Michael Gondry and Spike Lee—wasn’t always easy. At one point, she went for several years without being able to do any work at all on the film.
As Phrasavath’s contributions grew through both his knowledge about Laotian culture and his self-taught skills in film editing, Kuras realized it was a “natural progression” to make him her co-director.
“This project was always a project of my heart,” Kuras says. “But Thavi soon came to be an integral part of the process. For us, it became very much a dialogue of philosophy, of life, of death and of many different ideas of people in exile.”
The drama of this family’s struggles—from a daughter’s rebellion to a father’s abandonment to a brother-in-law’s tragedy—are what constitute the film’s strongest lasting impact.
Recounting their arrival in America, Phrasavath’s mother recalls that “people said if you make it this far, you are one step away from heaven.” Later, her feelings shift: “For us old people, life in America is hell on Earth.”
The political aspects of the film are never far away. In the first minutes, Phrasavath says that “the very first thing I ever knew was that my country was at war...I thought that killing and dying was a normal thing.”
The Betrayal (Nerakhoon) opened on November 21 in New York, and a nationwide release will soon follow.

Watch a video interview with Ellen Kuras, the director of the film, in which she discusses the challenges of bringing the Phrasavath family’s story to the film. Also, check out a trailer for the movie.

As a cinematographer, Kuras has been honored with Emmy and Independent Spirit Awards nominations, and is the three-time recipient of the best cinematographer award at the Sundance Film Festival.
Cinematographers are the movie world’s equivalent of still photographers, overseeing the role of images by making aesthetic decisions about lighting, composition, exposure, filtration and the movement of the camera.
In that capacity, Kuras has worked with some of the film world’s top directors, from Spike Lee (He Got Game and Bamboozled) to Michael Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Be Kind Rewind). She had become accustomed to having “a director standing over me who always had the broader, wider picture of the whole story,” she says. “I was able to just crawl inside the viewfinder and create that world with the camera.”
In filming The Betrayal, she stepped out of her comfort zone, wearing the varied hats of an independent filmmaker.
As a cinematographer, Kuras often tries to instill a single story inside each scene. While directing, she always had to be cognizant of the bigger perspective. There were occasional slip-ups, such as when Phrasavath does not appear in key scenes because he was at the time behind the camera, consulting with Kuras.
But it also came with new rewards, such as collaborating with the film’s composer, three-time Oscar winner Howard Shore, and learning how sound and music can also function as metaphors.
“Being in the directorial seat, you’re able to shape the entire story in a different way,” Kuras says. “It’s almost like we’re writing a poem.”

In FLYP’s interview with Ellen Kuras, she explains how one image can tell a whole story.

“The time will come when the universe will break. It will break piece by piece, country by country, religion by religion.” – Laotian prophesy

Watch clips from The Betrayal.