Rithy Panh invents cinematic poetry to tell the Cambodian tragedy

A tireless worker of the memory of his history and that of his country, the Franco-Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh has been making documentaries for thirty years to tell the murderous madness of a radical ideology implemented in blood by the Khmer Rouge and their guide Pol Pot in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. A madness which cost the lives of two million of his compatriots, including all the members of his family, when he was still only a teenager.

This time he chose fiction to evoke this extreme and unprecedented dictatorial experience. With this new feature film, Rithy Panh paints a portrait of the despot, and depicts this genocidal regime through the eyes of a trio of Westerners invited to report on the revolution, and eager to meet its leader. Presented during the last Cannes Film Festival in the Cannes Première selection, the film will be released in theaters on June 5, 2024.

Paul Thomas, a photographer (Cyril Gueï), Lise Delbo (Irène Jacob), a seasoned journalist, so named in homage to the resistance fighter Charlotte Delbo, and Alain Carillou (Grégoire Colin), a professor and intellectual, far-left activist, former faculty friend of Pol Pot, made a trip to Democratic Kampuchea at the invitation of the regime.

Under close surveillance, they are concocted a visit to the glory of the regime and its leader, “Brother number 1”, whose speeches are broadcast in a loop through sputtering loudspeakers, and his person presented in all its forms by craftsmen , sculptors and painters closely monitored.

The three Westerners hope for an interview with Brother Number 1. It would be a scoop for the journalist who has many questions to ask him about the gray areas of the regime, and the realization of a dream for Alain, blinded by his political commitment. and his faith in the revolution.

In this expectation, they comply with the demands of their jailer guides. But reality emerges and little by little, they perceive what this utopian revolution hides: a bloodless country, a starving population, massacred civilians, and a cult of personality taken to the extreme. The city of Phnom Penh emptied of its inhabitants, in dead silence, corpses in the swamps, faces emaciated by hunger…

Paul, exasperated by the impossibility of doing his job, tries to take side roads. Lise tries to ask questions not planned for the program. Only Alain, who devotes a solid cult to his old friend Pol Pot and Marxist ideology, continues to believe in it…

To restore a past story, Rithy Panh had until now made witnesses speak in his documentaries, as in S21, the Khmer Rouge death machine, in 2003, or the executioners, as in Duch, master of the forges of hell in 2011.

With this new feature film, freely adapted from the book by Elizabeth Becker, The Tears of Cambodia: the story of autogenocide, the director sets up an original stage device, which he had already experimented with in The Missing Image. The film combines scenes from classic fiction, archives, and sequences in which sculpted and painted figurines are staged, which replay in a miniature setting the experience lived by the three protagonists.

This skillful and effective staging allows the director to portray the drama that is playing out behind the scenes, and that the authorities are doing their best to hide from the sight of visitors: hunger, terror, death. “The film questions what we see, what we don’t see. Genocide is also silence. We see nothing, we hear nothing. Great terrors often correspond to a terrible silence”underlines Rithy Panh in the presentation of this film, which constitutes an additional and enlightening variation to the work of memory that he explores film after film.

Through the eyes of the three protagonists, who are each there in their own way to observe and testify, the filmmaker dissects the process of this radical implementation of an ideology, and the abuses that result from it. It shows the absurdity of a system and points out the idealized vision and passive posture of the Western world.

Language is at the heart of this new film by Rithy Panh. The director depicts these words, these concepts, these elements of language which nourish the dictatorship, orchestrate the manipulation, justify the massacres. “Words are souls, and politicians know very well that words are souls and know how warm up the people, who most of the time do not understand the power of words. The people works to emotion and some take advantage of it to manipulate it. People might think it’s a horror film, but that’s not what it’s about. The subject of my film is manipulation, the ideaology, language and what is each person’s role in that”estimated Rithy Panh in an interview with franceinfo the day before the official screening.

Rithy Panh slipped into the skin of Pol Pot, or rather into a silhouette, the menacing shadow of an omnipresent and invisible dictator, reduced to a voice. With this new film, the Cambodian director adds a stone to his work of memory in a cinematographic gesture of great freedom, which diffuses in the heart of the spectator an icy wave, salutary in these times of murderous wars and political radicalization.

Gender : Drama
Director: Rithy Panh
Actors: Irène Jacob, Grégoire Colin, Cyril Gueï
Country : France Cambodia
Duration : 1h52
Exit : June 5, 2024
Distributer : Dulac Distribution
Synopsis: Cambodia in 1978, three French journalists were invited by the Khmer Rouge to carry out an exclusive interview with the leader of the regime, Pol Pot. The country seems ideal. But behind the Potemkin village, the Khmer Rouge regime is declining and the war with Vietnam threatens to invade the country. The regime is looking for culprits, secretly carrying out a large-scale genocide. Before the eyes of journalists, the beautiful image cracks, revealing the horror.