Meeting With Pol Pot by Rithy Panh: The Filmmaker of Restraint, or How to Tell a Genocide.
Meeting With Pol Pot by Rithy Panh: The Filmmaker of Restraint, or How to Tell a Genocide
On May 16, 2024, at the 77th Cannes Film Festival, Rithy Panh's Meeting With Pol Pot had its world premiere in the historic Debussy theater. The film, based on real events, follows three journalists Lise Delbo (Irène Jacob), Alain Cariou (Grégoire Colin), and Pol Thomas (Cyril Guei) who travel to Cambodia to interview the dictator.
A Work of Memory
The film draws from the true story of Sydney Schanberg, Elizabeth Becker, and Malcolm Caldwell, who interviewed Pol Pot in 1978. While the Khmer Rouge orchestrates a carefully staged display of benevolence, the journalists gradually uncover the horrifying truth: a genocide in progress, almost invisible to the outside world.
The Pol Pot Regime
Between 1975 and 1979, Pol Pot's regime sought to build a purely agrarian society by eliminating intellectuals, the wealthy, and anyone deemed a traitor to the nation. City dwellers were deported to the countryside and subjected to forced labor. Suspected opponents and educated people were sent to concentration camps or torture centers like S-21 a former school transformed into a prison, later turned into the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. In just four years, nearly 18,000 people were detained there. For years, the international community largely looked away. After the regime's fall, the United States wary of Vietnamese influence in the region indirectly supported the Khmer Rouge, slowing international recognition of the crimes. It wasn't until 2006 that the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia began prosecuting those responsible, and only in 2010 that the main leaders were formally indicted for crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide.
Cinema as Resistance
Rithy Panh was eleven years old when the Khmer Rouge seized power in 1975. The son of a schoolteacher, he was sent to a labor camp, lost his family, and fled to France in 1980. Since then, his entire body of work has been dedicated to the memory of Cambodia's darkest chapter from Bophana (1996) to The Missing Picture (2013).
In Meeting With Pol Pot, he returns to the stop-motion technique used in The Missing Picture, animating clay figurines as a deliberately childlike way of depicting the unspeakable. The film interweaves archival footage, balancing respect for the victims with the need to document and educate. Cinema becomes both a pedagogical tool and an act of remembrance.
The Right to Truth
At the end of the screening, Rithy Panh received a long standing ovation in the Debussy theater. He noted that his first time at Cannes was in 1994, with Rice People the first Cambodian film ever selected for the Palme d'Or making 2024 exactly thirty years later.
Meeting With Pol Pot resonates far beyond its historical subject. It asks, through the eyes of journalists risking their lives for the truth, what our collective responsibility is when faced with tyranny and what it means to remember. More than forty years later, Cambodia still carries the scars. Preserving memory is not just an act of looking back. It is a way of protecting the future.
— Lyna Tadount, Télésorbonne