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S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing
Machine
review by
Elias Savada, 11 June 2004
It's disheartening when the
headline article in today's Washington Post examines the
American abuses against those detained in Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo
Bay, Cuba. Elsewhere in the front section there's an update on the
techniques used by U.S. interrogators on the Iraqi prisoners at Abu
Ghraib. Such ill-treatment of prisoners is a decades-old, if not a
centuries-old, practice throughout the supposedly civilized world
that straddles a moral dilemma that has been hidden, revealed,
condemned, condoned, and often ignored.
The worst example
of such torture against an innocent group was the destruction of six
million Jews by Hitler and his minions during World War II. Since
that war ended, one of the worst civilian massacre in Europe was the
Bosnian Serb killings of thousands of Muslims. During the Cold War,
the East German STASI destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands
of German citizens. Hava Kohav Beller's
documentary The Burning Wall was the first film I recall in
which incarcerated citizen and state operative are reunited years
after the fact in an effort to make sense of the earlier madness.
In that film, this riveting segment was
but one small aspect dealing with the “rebuilding” of post-WWII
Germany. In a new film, S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine,
former Cambodian captives and captors look toward each other, with
heads bowed in excruciating shame or anger, over nearly all of its
105-minute length. It's fitting that such a horribly fascinating
reconnection is unreeling at Washington's Avalon Theatre, which is
also rebuilding on its past glory, where The Burning Wall was
shown earlier this year.
S21 is a
film by Rithy Panh, a noted, award-winning documentary filmmaker
since the late 1980s, who was forced to work in the Khmer Rouge
labor camps between the age of 11 and 15. In 1979 he escaped to a
refugee camp in Thailand and eventually settled in France, where he
received his cinema degree. Like his other films, Panh uses the war
in Cambodia as a launching ground to exorcise inner demons that
still haunt him, and as a springboard to understanding the mindset
and policy of organized elimination by the Communist Party of
Democratic Kampuchea, or the Angkar as is it referred to
throughout S21. This appears to be the first of his films
commercially released in the United States (by indie-savvy First Run
Features, which picked the film up prior to its New York Film
Festival showing last fall).
The Cambodian atrocity that murdered
1.7 million Cambodians, with the ex-leaders only now facing changes
before an international tribunal, is examined in S21, the
code name used as for Tuol Sleng, an interrogation enclave (now a
genocide museum) during the Communist rule of 1975-1979. Some 17,000
people were abducted, imprisoned, questioned, tortured, and killed
under the “security bureau” superintendent and guards. Of those
thousands, 3 people survived, with Panh bringing two of them
face-to-face with 11 guards or other former Khmer Rouge personnel
who attended to the dictatorial desires of the Angkar and the
“needs” they believed the inmates deserved.
The straightforward documentary style
reveals the layers of abuse (and the incredible wealth of
painstakingly typewritten torture and medical records; large,
heavy-wood-backed mug shots; and devastatingly revelatory
photographs the obsessive prison authorities kept) that were
delivered to the men, women, and children at the behest of Him Houy,
deputy head of Santébal, the regime's internal security police, and
Prâk Khân, a member of the interrogation group. Both now claim
responsibility for their sins in front of survivors Van Nath, a
painter whose talent curried favor with Duch, the prison's boss, and
Chum Mey, now a public works department mechanic. As the film opens,
a tearful Houy is shown with his parents, who tell how their son was
a good boy taken away and indoctrinated in the evil, cultish ways of
the communist rulers. The other guards (all were male) echo this
discipline-intensive methodology, that as young boys they were
brainwashed by the Angkar. If they did not obey, they would
likely become victims themselves. Nath pushes these crushers of
humanity to better explain the evil they visited on their innocent
targets. The guards' collective conscience is troubled with the
torture and murder they committed; Houy alone hopes for a cleansing
away of the bad karma that has haunted him for 25 years.
Nath, whose artwork reflects the
horrors he is forced to recall, consoles Chum Mey, who was
imprisoned for two months before the fall of Phnom Penh, as they
revisit the torture chamber of their past. “We survived. We are
terribly lucky.” I wondered, sadly, that such luck must be
accompanied by so many agonizing memories. The demons of S21
are brought to us with a determined director's hand. The handcuffs.
The blindfolds. The harsh beatings and whippings. The psychological
humiliation. The blood-taking, whereby inmates were basically bled
to death; Mâk Thim, a doctor in the prison infirmary, remembers
these poor souls' deaths, breathing like crickets, their eyes
bulging. The entire insensitivity, which one guard, incredulously
bares before the camera “We didn't do it for fun.” Hard, very hard,
to fathom, when we learn there were three groups of guards -- mild,
hot, and rabid -- with some undoubtedly getting a sadistic kick out
of their evil endeavors. No, there is no fun in Rithy Panh's horror
tale. Especially the guards' semi-cathartic recreations of some of
their daily routines on imaginary prisoners. It is not a film --
which unflinchingly captures a still festering wound on humanity --
you are likely to forget. |
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