Film Analysis: The Elimination By Rithy Panh

The Elimination: A Survivor of the Khmer Rouge Confronts His Past and the Commandant of the Killing Fields. Rithy Panh is an internationally and critically acclaimed Cambodian documentary film director and screenwriter. Rithy Panh was a young boy when Khmer Rouge revolutionaries arrived in Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975.

Starting that day, he and his family were designated “new people”—the revolution’s code for those who needed “re-education”—and forcibly evacuated out of the city. That day began a terrifying experience that gradually took away most of his family, forcing Rithy to survive a series of brutal, and often arbitrarily cruel, ordeals.

In The Elimination, Rithy tells his story in vivid prose, expertly immersing the reader in his experience. Rithy is best known as a filmmaker, and that comes through.

Duch remembers specific details of some individual prisoners and their torture, while still trying to minimize his role as merely a man doing his job.

The interview segments provide a resonating glimpse into the psyche of a torturer and killer. Today, the former site of S-21 serves as a museum about the genocide, and films like Rithy’s own S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine have helped educate the public about the atrocities committed by Pol Pot and his regime. Rithy Panh’s book is another important and fascinating document in that process.

A filmmaker and a survivor, who lost his whole family at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. There is just something chilling and powerful reading this history from someone who had a firsthand view. I appreciated the firsthand accounts of what life was really like under Khmer rule. That 's probably the closest I 've ever come to a real life horror story. But aside from that, I found the story hard to