Published on October 2, 2024 at 8:47 p.m. / Modified on October 2, 2024 at 10:20 p.m.
It’s a low-budget film that doesn’t initially look too promising. An airplane represented by stock shots (archive images) drops three French people – a journalist, a photographer and a left-wing intellectual – on an airfield lost in the middle of nowhere. In December 1978, they were the first approved foreign visitors in the three and a half years since the Khmer Rouge took power in Cambodia by ousting Prince Norodom Sihanouk. A bit like in North Korea, they are strictly monitored, receiving only pleasant tongues from their guides who praise the achievements of “Democratic Kampuchea”. In fact, they are especially waiting to be able to meet Pol Pot, the former communist guerrilla who became the country’s all-powerful leader.
We see, it is not an action film that Rithy Panh invites us to, who here adds a new stone to his “tomb” of the Cambodian genocide (nearly 2 million dead, or 20% of the population) in which he lost his own parents. Author of documentaries (S21, the Khmer Rouge death machine2002) as fiction (One Evening after the War1997), the author here mixes the two genres by using rare archive images as well as figurines and miniature models (as in The Missing Image in 2013). A hybrid form due to lack of resources? Rather in memory of a modernity which has never believed in the interest of costly reconstructions.
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