Revisiting the reign of Terror
With the Khmer Rouge trial in progress, a new documentary on Pol Pot's top aide sheds light on Cambodia's dark past
To make a movie about Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge is to hear the cries from the graveyards. To revisit the Pol Pot era, even three decades later, is to walk among the ghosts. And to walk among the ghosts _ especially the Cambodian ghosts now that the word "Cambodia" rings with an awkward tinge to some Thais _ is to remember what makes us not Thai or Cambodian, but human all the same.
Nuon Chea, the Khmer Rouge’s number-two commander, opens up in new documentary, Enemies of the People.
To international viewers, the best-known film about Cambodia and the tragedy of the mid-1970s is The Killing Fields (shot partly in Bangkok itself). But the most chilling and historically valuable account on that subject is not the 1984 Western-produced drama: it is, in 2003, the documentary S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine by Rithy Panh, and now, in 2011, it is another doc Enemies of the People, in which the ghosts walk and talk perhaps in the hope of making themselves heard once again.
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About the author
- Writer: Kong Rithdee
- Position: Deputy Editor
