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Film Analysis: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine

887 Words4 Pages

The Khmer Rouge killing machine was filmed in the Tuol Sleng High School which the Khmer Rouge used as a detention center called S21 and is now a genocide museum. Between 1975 and 1977, nearly 17,000 people passed through its doors where they were interrogated, tortured, and executed. Vann Nath, one of only three survivors of the detention center, was a painter whose work found favor with his captors. He consoles another survivor who is unable to speak because of the grief that overcomes him in remembering the past. Nath then talks to a dozen former Khmer Rouge fighters who were prison guards, a doctor, and a photographer Houy, the deputy head of security, Khan the torturer, and Thi who kept meticulous registers at S21 try to justify their …show more content…

The guards dispassionately and predictably insist that they were just following orders, that indoctrination and fear for their own survival forced them to devolve into inhuman killing machines, but their overly enthusiastic re-creations of past abuse contradict their already sketchy rationalizations. It 's clear that institutional insanity and the regime 's perversion of Marxism have indelibly marked the guards as vividly as the righteously angry former prisoner, but S21 denies audiences any sense of catharsis or closure. Some crimes are just too horrifying to be forgiven or rationalized, and the film allows the almost unbearable horror of the Khmer Rouge to linger like an open wound in the blazing sun, playing powerful witness to an almost inconceivable tragedy. Panh 's disturbing documentary illustrates a point that the ubiquity of war renders perpetually timely: Those who deny their enemies ' humanity and dignity are doomed to lose their own.
On the other hand, “Inside Pol Pot Secret Prison (S-21)”, film does an outstanding, realistic story as to what happened in Cambodia under Khmer Rouge 's Pol Pot 's regime. My friend and I recently toured the beautiful temples and impressive history, but also part of our trip was to visit the so-called "killing fields" where Cambodians killed 1.7 million of their own people in a terror campaign of torture

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