Lost journalists documentary hits $50k goal on Kickstarter

A US production company has raised an initial goal of $50,000 through crowdfunding on Kickstarter, which will be used to produce a documentary following photojournalist Tim Page as he continues his search for friends and fellow journalists who went missing in Cambodia in the 1970s.

Mythic Films took to the crowdfunding platform to get the funds to support the production of 'Lost Brothers', a documentary following Page as he seeks to find out more about what happened to two fellow photojournalists, Sean Flynn and Dana Stone, as well as other journalists and Cambodians who went missing more than 40 years ago.

Producer Angela Krass told Journalism.co.uk that Page and his friends "always made a promise to each other that if anything was to happen they would find them and bring them home".

After being injured while reporting in Vietnam, Page was undergoing medical treatment when Flynn and Stone went missing on 6 April 1970 in Cambodia, she added.


Image of Tim Page, still taken from Mythic Films slideshow

"Tim's search, once the border opened, was to go back and find what happened to his friends. That search sparked a book, Requiem, and the success of Requiem then birthed the Indochina Media Memorial Foundation and a permanent memorial placed in Cambodia.

"That memorial started this documentary".

She said that while initial records "showed 37 journalists missing in Cambodia", that figure is now thought to be around 14 "but that number is very rough as it doesn't take into account the Cambodians that were missing".

The documentary makers currently "have a reporter working in Cambodia on the ground", Krass added, who is "going through the records that are now just beginning to open up".

"We're looking for all of the stories - while the focus has always been on journalists, we're opening it up to include others who were with them."

She said as well as providing funding, using Kickstarter has helped bring to light more details about what happened to some of the missing journalists from the online community.

Based on the rules of the Kickstarter website the production company had to reach its $50,000 target to receive any of the money. Having now reached that goal they have increased it to $60,000 to "allow us to widen the search, tell more stories, enhance the production and improve the film", the production company says on the Kickstarter project page.

The majority of the money raised will be put towards funding another trip to Cambodia, Krass said, with Page's next search estimated to take around two to three months. In past years he has carried out between 15 to 20 trips back to try and piece together what happened.

"As we gather the different stories, images and text that these people created back in the 1970s we will be widening the story as far as we can take it."

As for the "end result" of the documentary, she said: "We're really not sure where we're going to end up story-wise".

"Ideally you'd like to find a little bit about everybody, it doesn't look likely that's going to happen, but there is an overall sense of being able to tell these people's stories and make everybody aware of the risks they were taking".

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