Meeting with Pol Pot
Directed by Rithy Panh
CDP and Anupheap Production:  2024
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“It is hard to exaggerate our confusion and incomprehension at the time of our visit to Democratic Kampuchea. We were the original three blind men trying to figure out the elephant.”

— Elizabeth Becker, When the War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution

From the moment their plane touches down, the visitors in Rithy Panh’s film, Meeting with Pol Pot, are lost. The trio are on an airstrip somewhere northwest of Phnom Penh. A military truck pulls up. Ten Khmer Rouge cadres, dressed in black pyjamas and carrying rifles, step onto the concrete and stare ahead blankly. Finally, their tour guide, Suong, arrives in a jeep, followed by a spiffy white Cadillac Coupe DeVille.

“Where are we going?” asks Lise Delbo (played by Irène Jacob), a French reporter and the only woman in the group. Suong (Bun-Hok Lim) hears her but doesn’t answer. A lot of her questions go unanswered in this film. She keeps asking.

Meeting with Pol Pot is inspired by, and loosely based on, American journalist Elizabeth Becker’s 1986 book, When the War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution, which climaxes with her 1978 trip to Cambodia along with Richard Dudman, a fellow journalist, and Malcolm Caldwell, an academic. The film adds to Rithy Panh’s résumé as the most prolific maker of films about the regime that took his family and terrorised his country. He escaped to Thailand in 1979 and picked up a camera in Paris, returning to Cambodia in 1990.

• Tags: Cambodia, Colin Meyn, Issue 41, Rithy Panh