Rithy Panh once again exorcises the spectrum of the Khmer Rouge dictatorship with the strange film object Meet Pol Pot. The best known Cambodian filmmakers leave the pure documentary to offer us a unique work, at the edge of genres, which opens an exciting (and devilfully present) window on the work of journalism within a repressive matrix. The release of the film in physical format is the ideal opportunity to s
Rendezvous in unknown land
A journalist (Irene Jacob), an intellectual convinced by the revolution (Gregory Colin) and a skeptical photographer (Cyril Guey) were taken to Cambodia in 1978, at the invitation of the Khmer Rouge. A dangerous journey that leads them to a country ravaged by dictatorship, where they hope to be able to meet and interview Pol Pot, the great manito of these bloody events.
While it is easy for a Western public to affix a face (and a more or less clear story) to the different names of European tyrants and Soviet Russia, the image becomes more blurred when it moves away from the continent. This is definitely the case with Pol Pot, the dictator behind the Khmer Rouge and Communist Party of Kampuchea, whose name is known to everyone but not necessarily history. Nicknamed "Brother number 1", he is also and especially responsible for the massacre of nearly 2 million Cambodians. A real genocide, whose main lines are narrated in this Article Roman Franklin, field reporter for Liberation.
The missing image, again and again
Still looking for her Missing imageRithy Panh here sends three European eyes to the Khmer Rouge hell. And thanks to these three Western entities – and the three very different looks that they bring back from the same event that take place before their eyes – Rithy Panh will discuss the crucial role of journalism in armed conflict, but also the impossibility of escaping completely from the doxa imposed by the existing system. Indeed, it is hard to completely emancipate a regime that simmers in the media game to plant its decor and its extras, in order to turn its propagandist theatre.
If it sounds very theoretical, Meet Pol Pot It is only conceptually. Indeed, this feature film certainly describes from inside Cambodia's horror of those years, but never becomes a dusty or boring history manual, on the contrary. Turned like a political thriller, one feels the stead clinging around these three Westerns and an inevitable tension arises then. Tension, which is covered by cold violence, almost always absent from the plans but which is constantly guessed in the background. A deaf menace, supported by a frame that stifles its characters in constant over-shades. A long sequence in a "creative" Khmer Rouge workshop testifies to this tension Rithy Panh manages to introduce in his feature film thanks to the composition of his plans and his editing.
Even better, the beauty of his plans drowned in a horizon blocked by heavy storm clouds, the poetry of this empty tarmac on which patiently patiently our three lascars, or even the inventiveness of models that sometimes replace live action, all this makes of Meet Pol Pot A plasticly crazy work. From the total cinema resulting from the fertile soil of an artist marked with a red iron by the history of his country, this is the essence of this feature film to find already in physical format.
Data sheet
DVD Zone B (France)
Publisher: Blaq Out
Duration: 86 min
Release Date: November 19, 2024
Video format: 576p/25 - 1.33
Soundtrack : French Dolby Digital 5.1 (and 2.0)
Subtitles French
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