Filmmaker Daron Ker's earliest childhood remembrances come from the three torturous years he spent in a malaria-ridden concentration camp in the center of Cambodia's killing fields.

His next, more pleasant memories are of watching movies projected on a tattered bedsheet in a refugee camp just across the Thai border.

"The one film that I really loved was 'Spartacus,'" Ker says enthusiastically. "It's weird, because I didn't understand anything. But it was the most powerful thing I had ever seen."

So powerful it fueled a circuitous journey to the United States, through film school and, after a nearly 30-year absence, back to his estranged homeland to direct his first full-length documentary, "Rice Field of Dreams," which has its world premiere locally this week.

(click here or pic to read full LA Times story on Daron Ker )