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.

S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine documentary allows the viewer to see how Khmer Rouge revolutionary policy was implemented on the ground in day by day accounts by the prison guards and surviving prisoners.



Cast: Chum Mey, Vann Nath

Produced by: Cati Couteau, Dana Hastier, Aline Sasson, Liane Willemont
Cinematography: Prum Mesa, Rithy Panh
Edited by: Isabelle Roudy, Marie-Christine Rougerie
Music by: Marc Marder


New York, Melbourne, Cannes (Out of Competition): François Chalais Award, Vancouver

The director, Rithy Panh, is a lifelong filmmaker and a survivor of the Khmer Rouge camps who lost his parents, sister, and many other relatives to the genocide.

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

Read about this film

Country: France | Cambodia
Language: Khmer | Vietnamese
Color: Color
Runtime: 101 min.