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S21: The Khmer Rouge Death Machine - S-21, la machine de mort Khmère rouge (2003)
Synopsis
In the mid-70s, Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge converted the Tuol Sleng High School in Phnom Penh into the notorious S21 detention center.
Between 1975 and 1977, roughly 17,000 people passed through its doors. Only seven survived.
Filmmaker Rithy Panh, who himself spent four years in a Khmer Rouge labor camp, works with the same sense of devotion and relentless pursuit of truth as Claude Lanzmann.
He accompanies the detention center’s official painter, Vann Nath, on his first visit to S21 in more than 20 years, during which he confronts several of his former captors and tormentors.
Like Lanzmann, Panh uses cinema to get the facts on record: the guards re-enact their former routines, victims are remembered and named, and their stories are told.
And we learn that the terror of the Khmer Rouge was felt by torturers and victims alike: for four years, an entire society was held in a grip of murderous terror.
Essential viewing, a potent, scrupulously constructed act of witness, and a step toward reconciliation with an unfathomable past. -- New York Film Festival
New York, Melbourne, Cannes (Out of Competition): François Chalais Award, Vancouver
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About this movie
Title: S21: The Khmer Rouge Death Machine - S-21, la machine de mort Khmère rouge (2003)
Directed by: Rithy Panh
Date of birth: 18 April 1964, Phnom Penh, Cambodia
Writing credits: Rithy Panh
Music: Marc Marder
Year: 2003
Country: France | Cambodia
Language: Khmer | Vietnamese
Color: Color
Runtime: 101 min.
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