S21: THE KILLING MACHINE OF THE KHUMER ROUGE

by JÜRGEN FAUTH

Jürgen Fauth is a writer and film critic from Wiesbaden, Germany. He writes about film at World / Independent where this review first appeared.

 

In S21: The Killing Machine of the Khumer Rouge, Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh's brings together the victims and perpetrators of Pol Pot's genocide in a devastating documentary. Under the Khmer Rouge, approximately 1.7 million people lost their lives between 1975 and 1979; S21 is the name of one of the 'interrogation centers' where only a handful of the 17,000 prisoners survived.

What makes S21 uniquely powerful among human-rights documentaries is that Rithy Panh managed to bring victims and perpetrators face-to-face. Imagine a holocaust film in which Waffen SS or concentration camp guards talk to survivors or describe their daily routines for the camera. The result is a breathtaking look into the malleability of the human animal and its capacity for evil. It is also a very concrete account of what happened at S21, also known as konlaenh choul min dael chenh: "the place where people go in but never come out."

Panh takes painstaking care to observe the smallest of details. He follows Vann Nath, who survived S21 as party painter, through the abandoned complex as he sifts through the remaining stacks of the bureaucracy that always seem to accompany cruelty on a national scale: regulations for the guards, lists of the denounced, photos of the tortured, and the coerced confessions forced out of the innocent. The bland bookkeeping tells stories of unimaginable terror and pain.
Amazingly, Panh also brought the former guards back to S21.

When survivor Vann Nath comes face-to-face with his jailers, his calm but determined questions meet with vacant faces: the extent of the perpetrator's guilt is staggering, and so is their capacity for self-deception. The torturers and murderers of tens of thousands appear to have convinced themselves that they, too, are victims. The last defence of the henchmen of genocide is familiar: "I was only following orders."

The most stunning scenes of the film involve the guards re-enacting their past. With mechanical voices, the men (mere boys at the time) walk through the cells and shout abuse at the long-gone prisoners in strangely mechanical, hollow voices. In the sickening finale, they describe how they took prisoners away to the mass graves and re-enact their executions by club and knife. It is like watching the ghosts of past evil become flesh for the camera.

 

--Best Director and Václav Havel Awards, 2004 One World Human Rights Film Festival
--François Chalais Prize, 2003 Cannes Film Festival
--Grand Jury Prize, 2003 Copenhagen Film Festival