Welcome to this blog on the True Stories homepage of our film, "Churning the Sea of Time," which launched today, April 10. Like most westerners who had never been to the Mekong River, my expectations were set by Francis Coppola's great film, "Apocalypse Now." Because of that film, the Vietnam War, the Pol Pot Era in Cambodia that followed and the emergence of Vietnam, at least, into the modern world over the last decade, I've felt for a long time that a journey up the Mekong was one of the mythic voyages of our time. And in the movie, Marlon Brando's Col. Kurtz created his heart of darkness up-river in Cambodia in an Angkor Wat-like ruin deep in the jungle. I've always admired the work of the World Monuments Fund and have known of their Indiana-Jones heroism in being the first Westerners to return to Angkor after the fall of the Khmer Rouge - not knowing what they would find and setting up camp in a then-remote corner of the Cambodian jungle where the vicious Khmer Rouge still were active. So it was a perfect third act for our documentary, following the thread of "Apocalypse Now." But more important than the literary or film allusion, the story of their work was not only a story of the rebirth of Angkor - a vast archeological site in which only three of the hundreds of Cambodians who had worked there prior to 1975 survived Pol Pot's genocide - but I recognized it was also a story of the rebirth of Cambodia itself. What we were not prepared for was how virtually everything we encountered in Vietnam and Cambodia was different than we expected - and we've been around the world quite a bit. Most disorienting was trying to wrap our minds around the recognition that while much of the world was torn apart by grievances and vengeances dating back in the most obvious case more than a thousand years, in the Balkans 800 years, in the U.S. a mere 40 years to Vietnam and the Civil Rights Era, in Cambodia the past was buried very, very deep. The absense of the overt passion for revenge, which is so endemic in the West, and so destructive, did not, and does not tear Cambodia apart, as one might expect. What's the explanation? The other striking impression we had during the trip was how the Angkor ruins, of which Angkor Wat was only one of several dozen important sites -- how Angkor exceeded even our very high expectations. It is one of the few places in the world I've been to that, no matter how much you've read and studied, seen photographs of and watched films about, it is a place that surpasses everything you thought you knew and expected to find. All of the superlatives in all of the great books on Angkor don't prepare you for the breadth and magic of the place.