In Cambodia, on March 18, 1970, Lon Nol, King Sihanouk’s prime minister, came to power in a coup d’état backed by the United States, whose goal was to reach North Vietnamese troops in the northern region of the country. With the support of China, the Khmer Rouge began a struggle to overthrow the government. Asked by the former king to fight against American imperialism, farmers and laborers joined the Khmer in massive numbers. On April 17, 1975, Phnom Penh fell into the hands of communist rebels. The following night, cities were emptied of their inhabitants, taken to the countryside for political indoctrination. Hence began one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century, a genocide that would result in nearly two million deaths out of a total population of seven million.

Rithy Panh, eleven years old at the time, was among the stream of deportees forced to leave the cities for indoctrination by the Angkar (“The Organization”, the ruling body of the Khmer Rouge). On January 2, 1979, the Vietnamese, former allies in the struggle against the United States, overthrew the Pol Pot regime, and fear, hunger, forced labor and propaganda destroyed the memories and the identity of the Cambodian people. Like many of his fellow countrymen, Rithy Panh fled to Thailand, where he was miraculously reunited with his sister. After moving from camp to camp, he eventually made it to France with the help of the Red Cross, joining up with his brothers who had left the country before the tragedy.

Ten years later, in 1989, after earning a degree from the IDHEC French film school, Rithy Panh returned to the Cambodia-Thailand border to direct his first documentary feature, Site 2. Within a 4.5 km² (1.7 mi²) space were confined 180,000 Cambodians entirely dependent on aid that was distributed sparingly. Armed with a permit to film in the camp, Rithy Panh met Yim Om, whose testimonial served as the framework for the film. The director showed the daily lives of the displaced persons and their struggle to survive and maintain dignity in this environment. They were struggling as well to retain their memories of what had happened during, and before, the insane experience under the Khmer Rouge, in an attempt to reconstruct the identity of an effaced and annihilated people. With no voiceover or commentary, Yim Om’s words fill the space and through her, the negated memory of years of repression is finally expressed. Rithy Panh remembered Yim Om’s accounts when he directed the fictional feature Rice People four years later, constructed around rice farming, an ancestral activity that helped found Cambodian culture, had also been shattered by the Khmer Rouge and forgotten by children in interment, for whom rice “came from the U.N.” The director tackled the recent history of his country head-on two years later, in 1996, with Bophana: A Cambodian Tragedy. The Khmer Rouge had worked to destroy individuals; Rithy Panh was struggling to keep the victims from being anonymous. With an “intellectual” couple that had been imprisoned and oppressed by the Angkar, Rithy Panh drew the picture of his country’s history during those dark times and attempted to give a face and a name to people who were designated as “enemies” to be “destroyed.” In a random incident the director would never have provoked, the film also shows the encounter in S21, the main prison and torture camp of the Angkar now converted into a museum, between Vann Nath, one of the seven survivors of the camp, and Houy, deputy head of security, who is confronted with paintings representing the horrors perpetrated on the prisoners. Forcing him to look at canvas after canvas, Nath asked the former torturer to confirm that the abuse depicted had actually occurred. The words validate the memories and confirm that this all had really happened.
In 1999, the director decided to follow Alcatel’s installation of a fiber optic cable along the former Silk Road in The Land of the Wandering Souls. Among those digging the trench intended for “magic eyes and ears,” he discovered former refugees of Site 2 who displaced persons, renting out their labor for mere crumbs. Accompanied for the first time by an entirely Cambodian crew, Rithy Panh once again gave a voice to those who no longer have a past nor a future, who are separated from their roots. Again focusing on the individual destinies of a man and a woman, the director gives expression to the ineffable suffering of a people whose universe had been destroyed and who now had to face themselves in order to become whole again. This approach was similar to that of Bophana and led to S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine in 2003. The extension of work he had begun in his previous two films, S21 focused on describing how the political core of the Angkar functioned. With the help of Nath, whom he had met while shooting Bophana, he searched for memories of the place. After finding former torturers who had worked at the camp, he gave them a voice as well, allowing them to face up to their part in the country’s collective history. One particularly forceful sequence shows a former guard, who has come back to the site, literally relive his previous daily routines, going back over movements and re-saying words, in an incredible exercise akin to a near-trance.

“What is especially at stake is to protect generations to come. In order to move forward, questions must be answered. We cannot leave our children with a gaping whole in our collective memories,” Rithy Panh writes. The same stakes hold true for his films: giving back to a country the memories of which it has been deprived, giving back a voice to those who are not heard, giving back a name to anonymous victims and confronting history in order to prepare for the future.

The four films box set which has just been released in France contains Site 2, Bophana, The Land of the Wandering Souls and S21. It’s a powerful testimony about one of the darkest hours in contemporary history and constitues a great opportunity to discover the work of a major author in documentary films.

Olivier Gonord

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