A Perfect Soldier

Aki Ra was handling weapons by age five. By age ten, he was shooting people. Kidnapped as a child and conscripted to serve in Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge army, it was kill or be killed for the young boy. After surviving two decades of wartime soldiering, Aki Ra is now living a very different life. First introduced to Mountainfilm audiences in 2003 with Richard Fitoussi’s short film, Aki’s Story, a fuller and updated version of Aki Ra’s quest for redemption is presented in A Perfect Soldier. To date, Aki Ra has, almost single-handedly, removed an estimated 50,000 land mines and ordnance from the Cambodian countryside. No matter the number, he can never remove mental images and memories of his haunted past—the faces of his victims, their last anguished cries for help, his unending struggle to make sense of the atrocities he has experienced.