S21 The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine
by Rithy Panh
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DVD details
Actor: Houy Him, Khieu 'Poev' Ches, Mak Thim, Ta Him, Yeay CheuDirector: Rithy Panh
Brand: First RUN Features
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Subtitled); Khmer (Original Language)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 101 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2005-05-24
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: FIRST RUN FEATURES
DVD Reviews of S21 The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine
DVD Review: Like being given a guided tour of Auschwitz by the SS
Summary: 5 Stars
Compared to the European Holocaust, in which six million Jews as well as multitudes of other human beings were slaughtered in the concentration camps, the more recent events in Cambodia, where somewhere around 2 million people (perhaps 20% of the entire country?) died in only four years of Khmer Rouge rule, are relatively little known or discussed outside Cambodia itself. Of the 17,000 imprisoned and tortured in Tuol Sleng, the focus of this chilling documentary, only SEVEN survived. Perhaps only three are still alive today, forty years later.
Watching this documentary, in which two of the survivors engage in discussions about the camp with their former guards and captors and in which those guards re-enact their daily routine, is horrifying. Hannah Arendt wrote about the banality of evil; these individuals personify it. The opening scenes are of one of the guards in his ordinary life today, planting rice, holding his baby, talking with his parents. Over a series of meetings with Vann Nath, the Khmer artist who was one of that tiny handful of survivors, however, the viewer becomes aware of what lies in the past of this guard and others -- some of whom were only 13 or 14 years old -- and how they still try to force it to the back of their minds.
There are scenes in this film -- which is free of any overall narration that might allow the viewer to distance himself or herself from the material in any way -- that will remain with me for a long time, such as one guard showing, in excruciating detail, how he 'cared' for the prisoners in the former schoolroom entrusted to him at Tuol Sleng, fetching rice soup and water, and threatening to beat them for sitting up or moving too much. In another scene, one former guard sits at the interrogator's desk, reading from a transcript of an interrogation, while four others carry in what first looks like the body of a prisoner, but turns out to be a chair in which the prisoner would sit and be tortured into a confession. Without the confession to give the regime a 'legal' pretext for their decision to order the 'destruction' of the individual, the execution often didn't proceed. And some of those confessions, as Vann Nath tries to get the guards to realize, were improbable in the extreme. One points out to him that it seemed rational at the time. "I gave her a choice (that she was spying for) the KGB, the CIA or the Vietnamese enemy," one former guard says. The 19-year-old girl, too illiterate to write her own confessions, chooses the CIA, and eventually confuses to defecating in hospital operating rooms on CIA orders.
There are few heroes of this documentary. Even the other survivor, as Vann Nath gently points out to him, named some 64 other people in his own 'confession', each of which probably was in turn arrested and murdered. Nath himself has obviously wrestled extensively with the moral and spiritual questions that such horrific events raise in the mind of any thinking individual, rather than shying away from them as his subjects do. They still define themselves as victims. In that case, what about the thousands of Tuol Sleng inmates who are murdered -- what are they? Nath enquires. "Secondary victims," one guard responds. And yet, 70% of the guards survived. Nath, on the contrary, emerges as a Khmer version of Primo Levi and Simon Wiesenthal, making his life's work not only remembrance and justice, but also simply trying to get today's Cambodian regime to agree that the Khmer Rouge did something wrong.
Even after visiting Tuol Sleng in 2002 (where my guide was a woman of my own age with her legs scarred after having been whipped with barbed wire by the Khmer Rouge) this documentary told me much that I didn't know and gave me immense insight -- however disquieting -- into the minds of the perpetrators. The director -- a French citizen who escaped the genocide -- is to be commended for his ability to coax them into participating in the film: for all that German and Austrian governments and individuals have rejected Hitler and his regime more formally than today's Cambodian regime, I can't imagine an SS guard re-enacting what it was like to shove people into the gas chambers, while these former Khmer Rouge show exactly how they murdered their victims at the 'killing fields'.
Viewing this as Duch, the former head of Tuol Sleng, is being tried for war crimes in Cambodia -- in what is likely to be the only trial of its kind, given that some perpetrators like Pol Pot and torturer Ta Mok are now dead and others have been reabsorbed into the political system -- was particularly intriguing and thought provoking. For anyone interested in learning more about Tuol Sleng, I'd recommend reading Nic Dunlop's fascinating tale of how he discovered Duch, The Lost Executioner: A Story of the Khmer Rouge, or The Gate, a story of one man's encounters with and kidnapping by the Khmer Rouge before they rose to power.
Description of S21 The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine
{Winner! International Human Rights Award, Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema 2004}{Winner! François Chalais Award, Cannes Film Festival 2003}
{Winner! Gold Plaque, Best Documentary, Chicago International Film Festival 2003}
{Winner! Best Documentary, European Film Awards 2003}
In 1975-79, almost two million Cambodians lost their lives to murder and famine when the Khmer Rouge forced the urban population into the countryside to fulfill their ideal of an agrarian utopia. The notorious detention center code-named 'S21' was the schoolhouse-turned prison where 17,000 men, women and children were tortured, interrogated and executed, their "crimes" meticulously documented to justify their execution.
In this award-winning documentary and astonishing historical document, Rithy Panh and his team undertook a three year investigation involving not only the survivors, but also their former torturers. They persuaded both groups to return to the actual site of what was formerly S21, now converted into a Genocide Museum, to face their past. One survivor, Vann Nath confronts his captors, some of whom were as young as 12 years old when they committed their atrocities.
Human Rights Watch, widely regarded as one of the most influential and important human rights organizations in the world, and First Run Features, which for 25 years has distributed films that confront human rights issues, formed a collaboration to bring awareness to films that shed light on human rights abuses throughout the world. S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine is the first title in the HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH SELECTS DVD series.
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