The dictatorial and brutal Khmer Rouge regime under the tyrant Pol Pot in the mid-to-late 70s in Cambodia and the genocide engineered by it of over 2 million civilians have been perennial preoccupations in the works of Rithy Panh. The Cambodian documentary filmmaker-writer-editor’s own family faced expulsion from the nation’s capital Phnom Penh, and his close relatives, including parents and sisters, died of starvation even as he managed to escape to Thailand. With his latest film, Meeting With Pol Pot, he enters the same zone—Cambodia—again, albeit as a fiction filmmaker.
Based on the book by Elizabeth Becker, his latest film is about three French journalists—played by Irene Jacob, Gregoire Collin and Cyril Guei—invited to Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge in 1978 to conduct an exclusive interview with Pol Pot. Though Panh uses his familiar narrative patterns—mixing archival footage, newsreel and clay figurine scenes with dramatic acts and performances—the film is as much about the inhuman phase of Cambodian history as it is about the role of journalists reporting on it. An ode to Panh’s own The Missing Picture and Roland Joffe’s 1984 classic The Killing Fields.
Panh brings the ethics of journalism into focus through three pairs of foreign eyes and perspectives—one political, other apolitical and a third compromised and in cahoots with the despots. It raises several questions which, while being rooted in history, have a contemporary, universal ring—does a s.