Cambodian director Lissy Pine’s new documentary about meeting with Pol Pot: ‘Every revolution has good intentions at the beginning’

Last year, when director Rithy Phine set out to make a film about Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, the celebrated Cambodian director faced a strange dilemma. The actors he had chosen to play the communist dictator who massacred two million people in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 continued to disappear. (Also read: Kannada film sets up Cannes Film Festival 2024 with Banjara sunrise folk tale)

“We found two actors, but they went missing. The last one disappeared just two weeks before filming began,” he said in the 2003 documentary S. Director Pan, who shocked the world with the graphic details of the regime’s torture of prisoners of war, speaks. -21: Khmer Rouge killing machine.

“It’s difficult for anyone to play the role of Pol Pot in Cambodia today. You can’t force people to play the role of Pol Pot,” explains Paris-based Pan. As the country’s popularity rose, he decided to show the shadow of the former Prime Minister of Kampuchea. after that.

“I thought, okay, if no one else is going to play him, I’ll play in his shadow,” says Pan. He uses clay figurines of ordinary people in his films, creating an aesthetic fusion of fact and fiction. “Movies are magic. Even from difficult situations, amazing things can happen. For me, the shadows were much more interesting than the real characters.”

Meeting with Pol Pot

Pearn’s new documentary, “Meeting Pol Pot,” which premiered at the 77th Cannes Film Festival earlier this week, follows three French journalists who travel to Kampuchea to interview Pol Pot in 1978. It depicts the story of their arrival. Lise Delbo is a reporter and Paul Thomas is a photographer. The third, Alain Cariou, was an intellectual who was Pol Pot’s classmate at the university in Paris.

This Khmer-French film, part of the festival’s Cannes Premier section, is based on a real visit to Kampuchea by three journalists – American war correspondent Elizabeth Becker, who later wrote the book When the War Ended. “Cambodia” and the Khmer Rouge Revolution (1998) were written by American journalist Richard Dudman and Scotsman Malcolm Caldwell.

This 112-minute documentary, filmed last year at an abandoned airport two-and-a-half hours’ drive from Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh, exposes the communist regime’s propaganda machine that used revolution to change people’s lives and starve them to death. are doing.

“We shot this movie for six weeks last year at a real airport. Many of the people who built this airport 50 years ago died of starvation in labor camps. The airport was never completed,” said director Pan. said in an interview with Hindustan Times. Screening of “Meeting Pol Pot” at the Cannes Film Festival.

echoes of modern society

“It’s difficult to replace machines, but in a totalitarian system, when people die, you can replace them,” he says, with films such as “The Missing Picture,” an artistic exploration of genocide that premiered at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival. says the director of the film. Rice People (1994), about Cambodians struggling to come to terms with the violence that followed the fall of the Pol Pot regime in 1979.

“Each revolution has its own DNA,” he says. “There are a lot of people who talk about Marxism without reading Karl Marx. A lot of leaders like Pol Pot use ideology like in its pure form. Pol Pot wasn’t a Marxist. I think Marx doesn’t advocate killing people. When he talks about the destruction of classes, he’s not talking about killing people.

“All revolutions start out with good intentions, like fighting against injustice and exploitation of the poor. People want freedom and food for their children. Then… The need to maintain power makes leaders almost always totalitarian.”For a revolution to last, he said, in the case of Pol Pot, it would eliminate those who could not change themselves. Told. ”

Pine, whose work explores memories of atrocities, believes his new film also rings true about modern society. “The film is also a reflection of today’s issues where people are expected to pick sides quickly. Leaders manipulate to get them to take sides. Modern day manipulation is It’s too fast and erases all memories.”

survive the revolution

Pan, the youngest of nine children who was a teenager during the Khmer Rouge revolution, lost her parents and half of her siblings between 1975 and 1979. “My mother became ill and was hospitalized, but never returned home. My father subsequently passed away. One of my sisters disappeared from the hospital, and the other went missing after returning to pick up the guitar she had just bought. , I still have a glimmer of hope that he’s alive,” says Pearn.

Two of his brothers survived because they studied at universities in Europe. “The rest of my family all died. I survived by chance. You don’t survive because you’re strong, you survive because others help you,” he says.

Pern, who remained in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge rule, became a film director by chance. “I first started painting when I was in college. I wasn’t a bad artist. One day my painting professor gave me a camera with three rolls of film in it. I made my first comedy film about students trying to escape from school.

Meeting with Satyajit Ray

“I’m an old-school guy,” Pearn says. “I met Satyajit Ray once in Kolkata in 1989. He was a very tall and beautiful man. I was young then. He was the master. He spoke and I listened. I I watched his movies and studied how he makes each frame. It’s not easy to make and he’s very precise about close-ups. I am a student of Akira Kurosawa and Shohei Imamura. They influenced me and enriched my soul.”

“I need to express myself with my culture, my identity, my point of view. And sometimes I steal from these masters. I’m not ashamed to steal from them.”