Cambodian villages far away from collectors and elite art galleries in New York and London, the new film “LOOT: A Story of Crime & Redemption” documents the theft of the artifacts called “blood antiquities” of in and around the ruins of the temple of Angkor Wat and Koh Ker during the civil war of Cambodia.
Director Don Millar spoke with Luke Hunt of the diplomat about a documentary that took place three years in preparation, after his screening at the 14th Cambodian international film festival in Phnom Penh.
He attributes people like an American lawyer Tess Davis For having continued the thieves and the galleries who acquired Khmer artifacts and plunged deeply in the life of the British “collector” Doug Latchford,, Who was wanted for looting and trafficking in the United States before his death in 2020.
Latchford, a muscleman who liked to be seen with the bodybuilders which he supervised as president of Thailand bodybuilding and physical Sports Association, also took an intense hate for anyone who challenged his motivations.
“LOOT” documents how Latchford has paid residents to residents to dismantle and deliver stone sculptures and statues of religious divinities, before shipping them in Western galleries and auction houses, where they sold for millions of dollars.
For Millar, it was a story that started with the Pandora papersProduced by the consortium of investigative journalists, which equaled dozens of relics in Latchford and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, among other eminent institutions.
“LOOT” then follows the agents of the application of laws and the Cambodians who, as a child and young men, were under pressure and duped by Latchford, and their relentless quest to guarantee the return of these invaluable statues to Cambodia where a dedicated museum should be established.