Saturday, October 7, 2017








Over the course of a long and internationally acclaimed career, Panh has made several films about the killing fields, the medieval-style labour­ camps intended to “re-educate” the Cambodian people in keeping with a twisted brand of revolutionary socialism championed by an oligarchy of tyrants. From 1975, when power was seized by the Khmer Rouge (the followers of the Communist Party of Kampuchea), to 1979, when the regime was overthrown by invading Vietnamese troops, up to two million people died from execution, malnutrition, disease and overwork. Most were buried in shallow mass graves, unidentified, unhonoured.
“It comes like a big wave that can swallow you,” Panh, a married father of one, has said of his grief. “But you continue because you have to transmit not the horror but the dignity and humanity­ of the people who died … An artist brings more than testimony: he brings imagination, creation, the idea [of] how to fight against totalitarianism.”
It is a sunny day in Paris, to where Panh has recently returned from Los Angeles after completin­g production duties on First They Killed My Father, a Netflix biopic in Khmer, adapted from a 2000 memoir by former Khmer Rouge child soldier Loung Ung, and directed­ ­by Panh’s friend Angelina Jolie. Outside the window of our meeting place, an upmarket­ hotel bar on Place de la Republique, everyday life bustles; when not hard at work in the French capital, or ensconced at his other base in Phnom Penh, Panh likes to don his trademark fedora and walk the streets, mulling over future projects, revelling in the ordinary.
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Panh doesn’t have a house in Cambodia. In 1990 he returned to find the family home he had shared with his parents and eight siblings occupied by strangers (“I didn’t want to go back there anyway”). He smiles when he speaks of his father, a peasant’s son who became a teacher, then rose to the position of chief undersecretary of education: “He was passionate about free education, travelling to Paris, New York and Scandinavia to assess their education systems. He was a good man.” Another smile. “His stud­ents in Cambodia used to bring him apples.”
Expelled from the city by the Khmer Rouge, Panh and his family were delivered to a rural village, dressed in black and put to work. Eventually, physically and psychologically exhausted, his father stopped eating (“He chose to die as an act of freedom”). One after another Panh’s mother, siblings and relatives died from starvation, overwork, execution. An older sister had been deputy director of the National Museum­; she died, her identity effaced, on the killing fields, which are still disgorging the bones and teeth of victims after heavy rains.

In 1979, aged 15, the young Rithy escaped to a refugee camp in Thailand, later relocating to Provence, France, where his brother lived. While in Paris to study carpentry, he was handed a video camera during a party, kick-starting a fascination for the moving image; he graduated from the Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies a few years later.

As he writes in The Elimination, his acclaimed 2012 autobiography (co-authored with Christophe Bataille), for a long while Panh wouldn’t — couldn’t — talk about what he had been through. He refused to speak Khmer, his native language. He rejected all links to Cambodia. He has previously quoted the Italian Jewish writer Primo Levi, who, haunted by his experiences in Auschwitz, wrote of the deep feelings of shame and guilt often experienced by survivors of death camps: “You feel others have died in your place, that we’re alive because of a privilege we haven’t deserved, because of an injustice done to the dead.”

Time provided the necessary distance, as it does for so many victims of genocide: “Levi’s memoir [If This is a Man] was only read by 1500 people when it was published [in 1947]. Nobody wanted to talk about why. But you know, when I am made to eat roots and insects like an animal, when my dignity is stripped from me, I cannot feel like a human being. I have to learn how to live again.” He shrugs. “Cambodians didn’t want to see my early films. They wrote letters asking me to stop. Maybe they were ashamed, or the pain was too great. Then slowly parents and children came to see my films and they started to talk. Sometimes they cry. They tell me they are grateful, which makes me happy.”
Panh’s 1989 debut, Site 2, about a family of Cambodian refugees in a Thai camp in the 1980s, won several awards; 1994’s Rice People, which followed the struggles of a rural family, became the first Cambodian film to be submitted for a (foreign language) Oscar; 2003’s S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine brought together­ ex-prisoners and their former captors in Tuol Sleng prison, the former high school where the atrocities took place; 2012’s Duchy: Master of the Forces of Hell features interviews with a Khmer Rouge leader convicted of crimes against humanity, a chilling encounter Panh also recalls in his book.
“I do other films to show that I can,” he says, referencing 2008’s The Sea Wall, his feature adaptation­ of the 1950 novel by Marguerite Duras starring French actress Isabelle Huppert. “I have a choice to do films that make a lot of money. But if you go this way, if you make, say, a comedy film, you will not come back. I was a first-generation Khmer film director after the genocide. I felt that my place was to give Cambodia­ a view from the inside. We needed to write our own story.”

He is no fan of Roland Joffe’s multiple-Oscar-winning 1984 film The Killing Fields: “It is very, very difficult to represent death by genocide. While I recognise that films like The Killing Fields and [Steven Spielberg’s World War II epic] Schindler’s List attracted the attention of million­s of people, these directors did not exper­i­­ence the genocide.

“Of course I am humble and I applaud them. I could not direct a huge cast in how to kill and how to die. But I have to find other ideas.” What, then, of Jolie? Having first visited Cambodia in 2000 to film Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, then going on to adopt her Cambodian-born son Maddox in 2002, the Hollywood A-lister and activist is a long-time fan of the country. But she too did not experience the genocide. Does her outsider status help or hinder­ a film like First They Killed My Father?
Panh beams. “I love Angelina very much, mainly because she is authentic. When she flew to Cambodia to meet me I was impressed by her very European sensibility, the fact she understood everything so well. I liked that she wanted to make the film in Khmer. Which was about time,” he says wryly. “In Schindler’s List all the Nazis speak English.
“Before filming began Angelina issued a statement to the crew stipulating that they were to respect the Cambodian people, stating that this was Cambodia’s history, not theirs. Every day she would come to me alone with her driver; at lunchtimes she would wait by herself in a taxi queue, in the heat. I don’t know how she is seen elsewhere but in my country Angel­ina Jolie is very loved.”
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