A Quote by Rithy Panh
When the Khmer Rouge reached Phnom Penh, the first thing they did was to evacuate the population. Then they took over. The point of a revolution is to bring justice to the people, so even if you don't have proof of sabotage, you manufacture it.
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Part of the Khmer Rouge project was not only to destroy individual people, but to destroy the very notion of the individual. I want to simply rebuild the stories of people - it's part of my fight against the Khmer Rouge agenda.
I first went to Cambodia in 2002, primarily, as it turned out, to change diapers. My wife had work in Phnom Penh, and thus left with her driver and translator early each morning and returned later each night, while I took care of our firstborn son, who was 2 at the time.
People of my generation did not like very much to tell what we lived through during the Khmer Rouge regime.
From 1975 to 1979 - through execution, starvation, disease, and forced labor - the Khmer Rouge systematically killed an estimated two million Cambodians, almost a fourth of the country's population.
I saw the waterboarding device in Cambodia's notorious Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh and did not see another until I was strapped down on an identical one at SERE. Waterboarding was administered as a 'stress demonstrator' to show that an enemy could make one say anything. And one does.
What the Khmer Rouge had in store was a radical agrarian revolution, one with the professed aim of completely renovating society while giving the peasants a better life, of evening the rewards and feeding the hungry, of bringing a rational and utilitarian nation-state into being.
I am lucky to be a film director. I can create, express. It proves that I am still alive and the Khmer Rouge did not succeed in destroying me.
The Khmer Rouge tried to delete everything. They tried to erase our past, our personality, our land, our sentiment. What we tried to do in 'The Missing Picture' was to reconstruct our identity, to bring it back to the people through cinema.
My own reaction from a distance is that Pol Pot's demise as the leader of the Khmer Rouge was inevitable, and that his own paranoia did him in as much as anything else.
I remember my mother taking me as a very little kid to the roof of our home in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, to look at the bombs exploding in the distance. She didn't want us to be scared by the booms and the strange flashes of light. It was her way of helping us to understand what was happening.
Going to Cambodia to cover the genocide trials, I did read a lot about the Khmer Rouge; I read a lot about the country and its history.
However, the agricultural revolution took thousands of years, the Industrial Revolution took hundreds, and the information revolution only took decades. So, who knows what's going to happen in the next few decades, especially with the women's revolution.
A revolution without a prior reformation would collapse or become a totalitarian tyranny. A reformation means that masses of our people have reached the point of disillusionment with past ways and values. They don't know what will work but they do know that the prevailing system is self-defeating, frustrating, and hopeless. They won't act for change but won't strongly oppose those who do. The time is then ripe for revolution
I'd been away for about 10 days, and literally the first thing I did, even though it sounds very... it just shows you what a boring person I actually am, because the first thing I did was kiss my wife and hug my kid, then I turned on 'Fable 2' just to see how much gold I'd accrued over 10 days.
The trial organized with U.N. participation of some kind will be for crimes committed by Khmer Rouge leaders from 1975 to 1979. That's it.
I'm trying to manufacture a sleepover feel; like a tree house or a clubhouse. I want people to be silly and play and feel safe and some people, you have to coax them into that space and some people bring me further into that space, even past the point that I wanted to go.
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