Inspired by true events, Meeting with Pol Pot (Rendez-Vous Avec Pol Pot) follows a trio of French journalists invited to interview Pol Pot in Cambodia in 1978. Cambodian director Rithy Panh, whose family was expelled from Phnom Penh under the genocidal regime of the Khmer Rouge in 1975, has dedicated his life to preserving the historical and cultural memory of his homeland. Trained as a filmmaker at the Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies in Paris, he has amassed an impressive filmography focused on reconstructing the darkest period of his nation’s history.
Under the brutal rule of communist dictator and Khmer nationalist Pol Pot, Cambodia was forcibly transformed into a giant agrarian collective in the late 1970s. The cities were emptied, money was abolished, and the majority of citizens were forced to work on collective farms. Ethnic minorities, intellectuals, and any other groups or individuals deemed enemies of the state were systematically targeted and eliminated. Ironically a Paris-educated intellectual himself, Pol Pot installed himself in luxurious quarters in Phnom Penh even as the majority of the country’s citizens suffered a devastating famine in the countryside.
Due to deliberate destruction by the Khmer Rouge, little photographic evidence of this period exists. In response, alongside his work as a filmmaker, Panh co-founded the Bophana Center in 2006. Named after the subject of his documentary Bophana: A Cambodian Tragedy, the center is dedicated to the conservation of Cambodian audiovisual heritage, with its own archive, cinema, and film school. As a filmmaker, Panh has responded to the lack of material on this period by developing an innovative visual style in his work. Making use of everything from archival footage to animation to sculpture in combination with more traditional methods of documentary and narrative filmmaking, Panh once again showcases his unique style in his latest entry at the Cannes Film Festival.
Inspired by American journalist Elizabeth Becker’s 1978 visit to Cambodia, the film opens as three French journalists land at a mysterious abandoned airstrip somewhere in the north of the country. They have been invited by the Khmer Rouge to witness the results of the revolution and interview their great leader. While seasoned reporter Lise (Irène Jacob) and photographer Paul (Cyril Gueï) are skeptical, their editor Alain (Grégoire Colin) seems almost giddy. An old school chum of Pol Pot’s from his days in the French Communist Party, Alain has wrangled this visit, and is naïvely determined to show off the supposed egalitarian utopia his friend has created. Incongruously, a shiny white Cadillac pulls up bearing their guide Sikouen – alongside a military truck full of child soldiers. The deferent foreign affairs representative greets them warmly, but when Alain recognizes him from their school days in Paris, he feigns ignorance, not wishing to be outed as a member of the intellectual elite.
More prisoners than guests, the group is confined to their modest accommodations apart from the kind of planned propaganda-fueled sights that would seem right at home in North Korea today. Sikouen takes the group to an arts studio painstakingly pumping out busts and paintings of the great leader by hand, to a model farm stacked high with fake sacks of rice, and to a revolutionary dinner replete with French wine and cognac. Lise and Paul’s frustrations mount as they are hard-pressed to break through the party line, but Alain remains determined to ignore the cracks in the facade.
Throughout, Panh makes creative use of superimposed archival footage and clay dioramas (first developed with sculptor Sarith Mang for his documentary The Missing Picture) to shed light on the inner lives of his protagonists, and to ground this fictionalized tale in the realities of Cambodia’s past. When Paul sneaks into a neighbouring village, the horrors he witnesses are not re-creations, but real archival images from the time.
No fairy tale, the film culminates with the chilling promised meeting with “Brother #1.” It is only here, meeting his old friend in a lavish palace in the centre of the ruins of Phnom Penh, that Alain is finally forced to face reality. Sadly – just as in real life – that realization comes far too late.
Meeting with Pol Pot premieres this month at the 77th Cannes Film Festival.
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