S21: The Khmer Rouge Death Machine

S-21, la machine de mort Khmère rouge

France, Cambodia

2003

101 Min

Color

1.33:1

Khmer, Vietnamese

Currently 3.8/5 Stars.
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EXEC Aline Sasson, Liane Willemont

PROD Cati Couteau, Dana Hastier

ED Isabelle Roudy, Marie-Christine Rougerie

SOUND Sear Vissal, Myriam René

New York, Melbourne, Cannes (Out of Competition): François Chalais Award, Vancouver

Synopsis

In the mid-70s, Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge converted the Tuol Sleng High School in Phnom Penh into the notorious S21 detention center. Between 1975 and 1977, roughly 17,000 people passed through its doors. Only seven survived. Filmmaker Rithy Panh, who himself spent four years in a Khmer Rouge labor camp, works with the same sense of devotion and relentless pursuit of truth as Claude Lanzmann. He accompanies the detention center’s official painter, Vann Nath, on his first visit to S21 in more than 20 years, during which he confronts several of his former captors and tormentors. Like Lanzmann, Panh uses cinema to get the facts on record: the guards re-enact their former routines, victims are remembered and named, and their stories are told. And we learn that the terror of the Khmer Rouge was felt by torturers and victims alike: for four years, an entire society was held in a grip of murderous terror. Essential viewing, a potent, scrupulously constructed act of witness, and a step toward reconciliation with an unfathomable past. –New York Film Festival

Director

Rithy Panh

Rithy Panh was born in Phnom Penh. His father was a school teacher and inspector of primary schools.

His family and other residents were expelled from the Cambodian capital in 1975 by the Khmer Rouge. Rithy’s family suffered under the regime, and after he saw his parents, siblings and other relatives die of overwork or malnutrition, Rithy escaped to Thailand in 1979, where he lived for a time in a refugee camp at Mairut.

Eventually, he made his way to Paris, France. It was while he was attending vocational school to learn carpentry that he was handed a video camera during a party that he become interested in filmmaking. He went on to graduate from the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques (Institute for the Advanced Cinematographic Studies). He returned to Cambodia in 1990, while still using Paris as a home base.

His first documentary feature film, Site 2, about a family of Cambodian refugees in a camp on the Thai-Cambodian border in the 1980s, was awarded… read more

Rithy Panh was born in Phnom Penh. His father was a school teacher and inspector of primary schools.

His family and other residents were expelled from the Cambodian capital in 1975 by the Khmer Rouge. Rithy’s family suffered under the regime, and after he saw his parents, siblings and other relatives die of overwork or malnutrition, Rithy escaped to Thailand in 1979, where he lived for a time in a refugee camp at Mairut.

Eventually, he made his way to Paris, France. It was while he was attending vocational school to learn carpentry that he was handed a video camera during a party that he become interested in filmmaking. He went on to graduate from the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques (Institute for the Advanced Cinematographic Studies). He returned to Cambodia in 1990, while still using Paris as a home base.

His first documentary feature film, Site 2, about a family of Cambodian refugees in a camp on the Thai-Cambodian border in the 1980s, was awarded “Grand Prix du Documentaire” at the Festival of Amiens.

His 1994 film, Rice People, is told in a docudrama style, about a rural family struggling with life in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia. It was in competition at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival, 4 and was submitted to the 67th Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film, the first time a Cambodian film had been submitted for an Oscar.

The 2000 documentary, The Land of the Wandering Souls, also told of a family’s struggle, as well as showing a Cambodia entering the modern age, chronicling the hardships of workers digging a cross-country trench for Cambodia’s first optical fiber cable.

His 2003 documentary, S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, about the Khmer Rouge’s Tuol Sleng prison, reunited former prisoners, including the artist Vann Nath, and their former captors, for a chilling, confrontational review of Cambodia’s violent history.

More post-Khmer Rouge events are documented in the 2005 drama, The Burnt Theatre, which focuses on a theater troupe that inhabits the burned-out remains of Phnom Pehn’s Suramet Theatre, which caught fire in 1994 but has never been rebuilt.

His 2007 documentary, Le papier ne peut pas envelopper la braise, delves into the lives of prostitutes in Phnom Penh. —wapedia.mobi/en

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