This is my film of the year. I urge you to see it, especially as it isn't getting a DVD release until July 2011. You won't necessarily thank me for the recommendation, however, because it is bloody hard going. It has a terrible power, near-unparalleled among this year's offerings, and is draining rather than simply 'numbing' – possibly because of the sheer humanity involved.
The film's co-director Thet Sambath is an investigative reporter from Cambodia who has obtained something rather astonishing: frank and detailed confessions from former Khmer Rouge footsoldiers, mainly uneducated farmers, who helped turn their already battered country into a charnel house between 1975-1979. Against a backdrop of genocide trials for party leaders, this patient, methodical and remarkably gracious journalist, whose own family was purged, hears how ordinary men and women sowed the Killing Fields with the bones of their countrymen and littered the rivers with dead children. Some are filled with shame, although others believe Buddhism will save them.
"The flesh made a boiling sound as it decomposed" one recalls matter-of-factly. Elsewhere, an old man giggles as he mock-manhandles a young friend, miming with a plastic knife how he'd slit each throat. Everything is at once hidden and in plain sight: executions were carried out at dusk by torchlight, while the semantics of genocide are familiarly abstract – "problems" were "solved", but nobody seems to know where the orders came from. Cannibalism was rife. The effect is akin to chatting with psychopathic inmates in the beautiful grounds of some high-security psychiatric hospital.
When brutal regimes such as this one are over, they become fodder for academic papers or retrospective documentaries. Sambath states that what he is doing is "not for journalism... (but) for history", providing an explicit archive for a new generation of Cambodians who, until last year, were not required to be educated about this chapter from their recent past. The result is shocking, humbling, and utterly unforgettable.
