S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine

synopsis

This participatory documentary, which Panh described as a space for dialogue, brings together eleven of the 1,720 staff members of S21 prison and two of the 12,000 prisoners, the vast majority of whom were tortured. It explores the sites where torture took place, scrutinising the prison guards’ meticulously kept records, registration photographs and the paintings created after 1979 by the imprisoned Vann Nath. He survived thanks to the portraits of Pol Pot that he produced under the supervision of a commander nicknamed “Duch” in a workshop within earshot of the torture chambers. The film’s focus remains on the perpetrators. It has them re-enact the once-routine acts of everyday cruelty and seeks to understand how they became cogs in the murderous machinery.

The film was made almost a quarter of a century after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, under whose rule some two million people perished, and five years after the death of Pol Pot, who never stood trial in a proper court of law. The film succeeded in documenting the crimes – a body of evidence that lawyers continued to use for many years – and in securing specific confessions and accounts of torture and violence from several perpetrators. At the time of filming, Cambodia passed the law establishing a special tribunal to try the Khmer Rouge in 2001. Commander Duch became the first defendant and was ultimately sentenced to life imprisonment. During a court-ordered reconstruction at the crime scene, some of those featured in the film re-enacted their movements before the judges. The footage was directly incorporated into the investigation: during the re-enactment, Duch was also confronted with unused footage and testimonies from S21. No other former S21 staff members were prosecuted. In 2003, the international Khmer Rouge Tribunal was established under the auspices of the UN.

biography

Rithy Panh (1964) explores the brutal rule of the Khmer Rouge (1975–79) and its lingering effects in present-day Cambodia. In the film Duch: Master of the Forges of Hell (2011), which was screened at Ji.hlava IDFF in 2012, he presents the testimony of the prison commander present in the earlier film S-21 (2003) using only the words of his subordinates. The autobiographical The Missing Picture (2013), which was nominated for an Oscar, recounts his childhood under the Khmer Rouge, during which the director’s entire family perished. The American film theorist Timothy Corrigan wrote about the film on the dok.revue website.

film details

director:	Rithy Panh
producer:	Cati Couteau