In Threads: Kosal’s Reel, the moving life story of Kosal Nhean, a survivor of the Khmer Rouge genocide, is interwoven with that of her volunteer English teacher (Shanee), a Jewish American woman from the Boston area, who first met Kosal when the latter was a newly arrived refugee in San Francisco in 1986. Kosal later relocated to southern California, where she raised her four children as a single parent while working two jobs — one at a donut-shop counter, the other as a seamstress. Using vivid footage shot in Cambodia and California over the course of two and a half decades, and supported by a riveting historical backdrop of archival footage, the relationship of these two women, which began as pupil and teacher when both were in their early 20s, grows into a remarkable lifelong friendship. Resonances between Kosal’s experience and that of Shanee’s grandmother, Gittel, who fled pogroms in Ukraine during the early 1920s to find refuge in Hartford, Connecticut, make it clear that across differences of culture and context, it is possible to build a bridge and be moved by each other’s stories.
In a de facto challenge to implicit stereotypes about a woman who earns a low wage and speaks English with a Cambodian accent, the many layers of Kosal’s experience are gradually revealed: the ordeals she endured in the four-year genocide; her having saved several others’ lives through ingenuity and daring; her narrow escape, on foot, to a refugee camp, while carrying her newborn daughter in her arms; the hardships she and her family faced during their six years in a Thai refugee camp; and, in 1985, at long last, their arrival in the United States. Through shots of Kosal’s day-to-day life in California, viewers come to appreciate the enormous challenges she has overcome in providing an education and solid values for her 4 children in a low-income urban neighborhood in which pressures to join gangs, drop out of high school, and abuse drugs are ubiquitous. There are shots of and interviews with various members of Kosal’s family. These include her ex-husband, whom the Khmer Rouge had forced Kosal to marry on pain of death and who abandoned her and their 4 children shortly after their arrival in the US, and their eldest son, who served in the US army during the war in Iraq.
When Kosal’s father, a widely revered Buddhist monk, age 95, is on his deathbed, Kosal finally overcomes her fears of returning to Cambodia, and, after more than a 20-year absence, travels back to the Buddhist temple he heads, taking along her 17-year-old daughter, Saroeutrh Kayla, a vibrant, sensitive young woman who was born in the refugee camp and is now thoroughly Americanized, yet intensely eager to learn about her heritage. At the temple, Kosal reunites with her beloved, long-lost sister Kim Sat (a Buddhist nun and an extraordinary woman in her own right), and finally learns the fate of their four brothers.
Although in some ways specific to the Cambodian American experience, this film touches upon wider, archetypal themes that are relevant not only for refugees and immigrants, but for all human beings who seek wholeness, and who strive to preserve meaningful ties with family and friends, and to repair those connections that have been severed by historical and political events. The film’s title – along with the imagery and motif of sewing – evokes the effort to gather together the threads of one’s life, and to pick up the pieces one has lost along the way. The title also alludes to the continuing bonds between the dead and the living, and our ancestors and descendants.
The film is currently in post-production, and funding is urgently needed to cover the costs of bringing the final version to fruition. A pre-release screening is scheduled to take place on Thursday afternoon, November 13, 2025, at Yale University.
The Crew:
Shanee Stepakoff: Director, Producer. Shanee holds a BA in English, summa cum laude, from the University of Maine, an MFA in creative writing from The New School, and is nearing completion of a PhD in English at the University of Rhode Island. She is the author of Testimony: Found Poems from the Special Court for Sierra Leone (Bucknell University Press, 2021) and of over two dozen scholarly essays, articles, and chapters on literary and artistic responses to collective trauma. She has won awards for her writing in the genres of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Shanee also spent two years as a psychologist/trainer with CVT (Center for Victims of Torture), first in Guinea and later in Jordan. From 2005 to 2007 she was the psychologist for witnesses at the UN-backed war crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone. Additionally, she provided training for Cambodian NGOs responsible for the provision of psychosocial support for witnesses in the Khmer Rouge tribunal. Shanee’s vision for Threads: Kosal’s Reel began crystallizing in early 1986, shortly after she graduated from college in Worcester, Massachusetts and moved to San Francisco, where she volunteered as an English-as-a-second language teacher for Cambodian refugee women and first encountered the film’s subject, Kosal Nhean.
Tiffany Cunningham: Co-Producer, Editor. BA, Yale University, 1989. Dr. Cunningham (a.k.a. Tiff) worked as an editorial assistant, historical researcher, production assistant and audio-lineup assistant for the award-winning feature-length documentary, A Double Life. For Threads: Kosal’s Reel, Tiff has been a key decision-maker re. which visual, audio, interview, and archival material to include, and has drawn on her extensive experience as a genealogical researcher to integrate themes of ancestry and family history (both Kosal’s and Shanee’s) into the story.
Alrick Brown: Associate Director, Associate Producer, Lead Cinematographer, Artistic Advisor. BA and M.Ed., Rutgers; MFA in Filmmaking, NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Mr. Brown is a tenured Associate Professor of Undergraduate Film and Television at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. He is a writer and director whose films have screened in over thirty film festivals and at Lincoln Center, and have won major honors and prizes, including the Sundance World Cinema Audience Award for his first feature film, Kinyarwanda. His cinematic reach also includes credits on the small screen as director, producer and writer on a wide variety of award-winning projects.
Catherine Masud: Consulting Producer, Editorial Consultant. BA, Brown University, MFA in Film, Vermont College of Fine Arts. Catherine is an award-winning filmmaker and educator, with over 30 years of production experience in documentary and fiction films. As a producer/director/writer/editor, her work has won major awards in Cannes and other international festivals and competed in the Oscars. Her most recent feature-length documentary (A Double Life, 2023) won the Audience Favorite Award at the Mill Valley Film Festival.
Sophy Theam: Lead Khmer-English Translator, BA, Boston College. Ms. Theam arrived in the United States in 1984 as a child refugee from Cambodia, and grew up in Connecticut. She has worked for the Cambodian Mutual Assistance Association of Greater Lowell; the Khmer Youth and Family Center of Lynn, Massachusetts; Southeast Asian Bilingual Advocates; and several other agencies serving the Cambodian American community as a Khmer-English translator and in other capacities. Ms. Theam has been the lead translator for Threads: Kosal’s Reel for the past twenty years, and has checked and refined the work of the other four translators.
Lawrence ‘Apu’ Rosario: Cinematographer for Cambodia 2001 shoot. Bachelor of Arts, Notre Dame College, Dhaka, MFA in Motion Picture Photography, Film and Television Institute of India, Pune. Mr. Rosario is a Bangladeshi cinematographer with extensive credits across more than three decades. He received the BACHSAS Award and the National Film Award for Best Cinematographer in 2011 (both for Amar Bondhu Rashed) and the FFTG Award for Best Cinematographer in 2020 (We).
Micah Schaffer: Co-Cinematographer, Sound Recordist. BA Stanford University, MFA, NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Micah’s first feature documentary, Death of Two Sons, was awarded the HBO “Life Through Your Lens” Emerging Documentary Filmmaker Award. Micah was the cinematographer on “Shadows of a Leader: Qaddafi’s Female Bodyguards”, an official selection at the Montreal World Film Festival. He was the co-producer for “Iron Ladies of Liberia”, a PBS/BBC documentary about Africa’s first female president.
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