MEETING WITH POL POT
Rendez-vous avec Pol Pot (Meeting with Pol Pot): fiction as a means of remembrance
On 16 May, the new film by French-Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh will be presented in the Official Selection of the Cannes Première section: Rendez-vous avec Pol Pot (Meeting with Pol Pot). The film plunges us into the darkest period of Cambodia’s history. The country was under the yoke of Pol Pot, le communist leader of Cambodia and the red Khmers.
1978: three years after Cambodia became Democratic Kampuchea. In this setting torn apart by dictatorial rule, three Frenchmen accept an invitation from the regime, hoping to get an exclusive interview with Pol Pot. Among them, a journalist familiar with the country, (Irène Jacob), a photojournalist (Cyril Gueï) and an intellectual sympathetic to revolutionary ideology (Grégoire Colin). Their convictions will be turned upside down by the treatment they receive and what they discover behind the propaganda.
This film marks a return to fiction for Rithy Panh, best known for his must-see documentaries, including S21, la machine de mort Khmère rouge (S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine), presented in the Out of Competition selection at the 2002 Festival de Cannes. His most recent fictional work, released in 2008, was an adaptation of Marguerite Duras’s literary masterpiece, Un barrage contre le Pacifique (The Sea Wall), starring Isabelle Huppert.
“For the Cambodian people, it’s about reclaiming their identity and roots”.
– Rithy Panh
The screenplay for this new film, co-written with Pierre Erwan Guillaume, is loosely inspired by the book, When the War Was Over : Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution, written by American journalist Elizabeth Becker, who was a local correspondent for the Washington Post during the Vietnam War. On 22 December, Malcolm Caldwell, Richard Dudman and her managed to interview Pol Pot. This was the first interview he gave to non-Communist American journalists.
For the documentary, L’Image Manquante (The Missing Picture), Rithy Panh received the top award in the Un Certain Regard section at the 66th Festival de Cannes. Work after work, he remains committed to a duty: honouring the memory of the victims of his homeland.
