-Analysis-
PARIS — In film after film, Cambodian-born director and screenwriter Rithy Panh, who spent his youth in the 1970s in a re-education camp under Khmer Rouge rule, explores the madness of this regime that claimed 2 million lives. He is back with a new film, Meeting with Pol Pot, recently presented at the Cannes Film Festival.
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This is not so much a depiction of the Khmer Rouge death machine, as he did in his best-known documentary S-21, but rather a portrait of the its ideological hold, its manipulation of the outside world. It is inspired by a book by American journalist Elizabeth Becker, who in 1978 was one of the few witnesses of the Khmer Rouge madness.
In the movie, three Frenchmen, a journalist, a photographer and a communist activist who knew Pol Pot at the Sorbonne in Paris — yes, because the Cambodian dictator studied at the Sorbonne university — are invited to “Democratic Kampuchea,” as the country had been renamed.
Without giving away too much of the plot, let’s just say that the key moment is a face-to-face confrontation between the French activist, still holding on to his illusions, and “Brother Number One”, the nom de guerre of his friend Pol Pot. And that is where the movie touches on the universal.
Trap of totalitarianism
The true lesson of the film, a lesson of history indeed, is that of the ideological hold, of the blindness that all too often leads honest people to close their eyes and fall into the trap of totalitarianism.
The Khmer Rouge are a fine example of this blindness. They were part of the galaxy of communist guerrilla movements in Southeast Asia, along with the Vietnamese National Liberation Front (NLF, a.k.a. Viet Cong), which the U.S. war propelled to the rank of anti-imperialist avant-garde — to the point of becoming heroes in the West.
The universality of this message is striking, at a time when ideology is making a strong comeback.
On April 17, 1975, the victory of the Khmer Rouge was hailed on the front page of the French daily Libération, with the headline “The flag of resistance flies over Phnom Penh.” Le Monde was no less glowing.
The hard core of the movement was made up of ideologically pure fundamentalists who want to build the new society by literally killing the old one. The visitors in Meeting with Pol Pot gradually discover this eradicative will.
Incitement to lucidity
The universality of this message is striking, at a time when ideology is making a strong comeback, when we run the risk of once again confusing a legitimate cause with those who claim to embody it, without sorting things out.
Panh’s movie is an incitement to lucidity in the face of the power of words, to distance oneself from all ideologies, and to vaccinate against manipulation.
These are public health reflexes in the age of social media — and we can only imagine how skillfully the Khmer Rouge could have used these platforms to “sell” their new society built on genocide. The film is a salutary antidote to this blindness.
