Meeting with Pol Pot

In his new work, Cambodian-French genocide survivor Rithy Panh (The Missing Picture) depicts once more the traumas of the Khmer Rouge regime by combining clay figurines and archival footage with live action, this time in the form of a fiction film. Veterans of French cinema Iréne Jacob (The Double Life of Veronique), Grégoire Colin (Beau Travail), and Cyril Guëi (Grigris) portray journalists who in 1978 are invited to interview Cambodian dictator Pol Pot and familiarize themselves with the absurd “agrarian utopia” of Democratic Kampuchea where the dictator’s word is the law and private property doesn’t exist. The more the journalists see and hear, the more their moral tolerance is tested and the harder it becomes to control their feelings. Panh’s film is an ambitious attempt to deconstruct the terrifying nature of the Khmer Rouge regime’s violent propaganda reality. Yet at the same time, the journalists' visit turns into a pathetic afterword for the French New Leftist radicalism of the 1960s.

Valtteri Lepistö