In April 1975, the Khmer Rouge regime took over Cambodia, plunging the country into four years of absolute terror and unprecedented genocide. The fall of Phnom Penh was followed by a policy of terror, organised famine, forced labour, mass executions and forced displacement.

In the late 1970s, as the brutal Khmer Rouge regime plunged Cambodia into horror, hundreds of thousands of Cambodians fled their country, finding precarious refuge in camps on the Thai border. These camps, such as Khao I Dang and Sakéo, appeared to be temporary havens in the face of genocide, but their reality soon proved to be far more complex and painful.