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Meeting With Pol Pot Explores How Ideology Can Curdle Into Evil
Rithy Panh’s historical drama follows three French journalists attempting to interview the Khmer Rouge leader at the height of the Cambodian genocide.
He nods along vigorously to his interlocutors’ encomiums about their attempts to create “a new man,” and eagerly swallows the PR-friendly version of life under Pol Pot’s Year Zero brand of communism: a uniform world of anonymous, seemingly happy laborers who’ve given up evil colonialist trappings such as property, free will, individualism, education, and … eyeglasses. The third member is Paul Thomas (Cyril Gueï) a French African photojournalist with years of experience covering war zones: He’s the one who immediately bristles at the Khmer Rouge cadres’ attempts to control the narrative and to prevent him from photographing subjects that they haven’t preapproved.He’s also the one who discovers that the big, bountiful sacks of rice that have been helpfully stacked for their admiration are actually full of dirt. Much of the trio’s time is spent around the tarmac of the notorious Kompong Chnnang Airport, an airstrip the Khmer Rouge began building in 1976 but never finished; for years afterward this area reeked of death, from the thousands of workers who were enslaved, starved, and executed during its construction, their bones sometimes jutting out of the ground during the rainy seasons.
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