Apocalypse Then: On Rithy Panh’s Meeting With Pol Pot

Still from Rithy Panh, Meeting With Pol Pot, 2024. © Strand Releasing.

Rithy Panh has spent his life reconstructing the world of the people who killed his family. The Cambodian filmmaker has resurrected the Khmer Rouge (KR) on screen in about a dozen features and documentaries, creating vivid testaments to a so-called “genocide with no images.” His latest, Meeting with Pol Pot (2024), which opened in New York this June, brings in the outsider’s gaze. Set three years after the KR seized power in 1975 and started deporting its citizens to the countryside—eventually killing an estimated two million to construct its vision of a peasant revolution—the feature follows three journalists as they slowly discover the reality of the "ideal Communist state." Meeting is based on the experiences of the first Western correspondents to enter “Democratic Kampuchea” after it sealed its borders. Their task was to determine if the rumors were true: Was the regime committing genocide? 

This historic press trip occurred on the cusp of revelation; weeks later, Vietnamese forces would invade and expel the KR from Phnom Penh. The film opens with the visitors (originally American and British but here reimagined as French) overlooking an expanse from the tarmac at Kampong Chhnang Airport, a site later notorious for the stench of corpses buried in the area. What made this trip additionally chilling, writes Elizabeth Becker—one of the original journalists, whose memoir When the War Was Over Panh used as source material—was the lack of shared reality. Becker (in the film as Lise) recalls immediately sensing the cracks in “the murderous regime’s facade of respectability.” Her leftist colleagues Richard Dudman and Malcolm Caldwell (here Paul and Alain) weren’t as quick to cast judgement.1 Caldwell was later shot on the trip, allegedly by KR soldiers (though rumors persist that it was a Vietnamese agent), his fate to become a symbol of campist folly. Here was a radical Marxist academic so deluded by ideology that he accepted state propaganda as fact, killed by the very cause he supported. Panh captures the journalists’ disorientation through slow, tense sequences, in which they dispute what they see. Their limited view is portrayed through wide-angle shots of empty landscapes, contrasted with archival footage revealing what was out of frame: the labor camps, the starving farmers, the acts of wanton torture.

Jean Renoir famously remarked that “a director only makes one film in his life. Then he breaks it into pieces and makes it again.” Few filmmakers have hewed to this maxim as closely as Rithy Panh, who was eleven when the KR took over the country, and was one of the few members of his family to survive. After a stretch in a Thai refugee camp he moved to Paris and eventually studied cinema at L’IDHEC. Decades later he returned to the camp, eager to honor the experiences of the population, whose testimony had often been drowned out by pundits and commentators. 

Revising cinematic techniques that depict Cambodians as wordless victims, Panh became the first filmmaker in Cambodia to eliminate voice-over by placing the camera and sound boom close to the subjects.2 Through an approach he terms “la parole filmée” (filmed speech), his works move beyond the conventional talking-head documentary format to become visceral records of time and place. In his first documentary, Site 2 (1989), refugee camp inhabitant Yim Om wanders in thought and takes deep breaths, her voice blending with ambient sounds of children and insects. S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003), meanwhile, turns the focus onto former prison guards, prompted by the director to reenact gestures of extermination in front of the camera. What’s most poignant about Panh’s films is their escalating intimacy, carefully cutting ever closer to a throbbing nerve. His most famous feature, The Missing Picture (2013), which earned him an Oscar nomination, narrates an eleven-year-old’s experience of the KR’s takeover using claymation figures. Panh’s films are filled with art produced under conditions of great torment—the whimsical clay models made by artist Sarith Mang, oil paintings by survivors, even the KR’s official imagery. In Meeting, the regime’s propaganda art, architecture, and uniforms are rendered in meticulous detail. One wonders if Panh painted these dictators himself.

Still from Rithy Panh, Meeting With Pol Pot, 2024.

What is it like to rebuild the world of your family’s murderers over and over again? Panh answers in his films, which are intense entwinements of private pain and public service. His body of work has been at the forefront of debates about how cinema represents crimes against humanity, not only by preserving public memory but by creating it. For the scant representation that does exist of this era, his work also serves as a corrective. Panh’s 1996 documentary Bophana: A Cambodian Tragedy identifies one photograph, of a young woman named Hout Bophana, among the thousands of prisoner mugshots found at Security Prison S-21. While MoMA would go on to exhibit these images with no individual context, Panh combined Bophana’s photograph with her love letters to her husband and family recollections, to reconstitute a human presence among the anonymous faces. Though Panh insists his methods are not those of a historian (“I do not have enough distance for that,” he often states), his work has nevertheless had concrete political and judicial impact. Staff from his Bophana Audiovisual Resource Center, for instance, joined the Khmer Rouge Tribunal that sentenced top KR leaders like Kaing Guek Eav to life in prison.  

In Panh’s memoir The Elimination, there is a haunting description of a former guard who, after torturing a prisoner all night, would fall asleep beside him. This disturbing intimacy lives on in Panh’s approach to his subject matter—the inescapable closeness between an artist and his tormentors. As a reenactment, Meeting raises questions around depicting a political force that personally scarred its creator. Distance, as Panh says, is not possible. Is distance important for historical analysis?

When addressing such devastating crimes, the question of nuance feels perilous; those seeking to explore complexities risk appearing to minimize the murders (a legitimate concern given the persistence of the genocide-denial movement well after 1979). Though indisputably catastrophic, the failed revolution remains shrouded in confusion: rival factions within the Cambodian Communist Party, proxy battles between Soviet and Chinese influences, US intervention, how practice can so disastrously diverge from theory.3 Today, the ruling Cambodian People’s Party instrumentalizes this warped memory, justifying authoritarian policies by defining itself against the former regime. One senses Panh’s disillusionment with the era’s radical politics writ large. In Meeting, Alain sports a “Le Mois International d’Actions” tote bag that feels almost sardonic. In his conversation with Becker at Film at Lincoln Center, Panh joked that Pol Pot in the film was actually Ho Chi Minh: “your Uncle Ho.”4 Who was his barb addressing? Presumably the Western academics and activists who continued their support long after atrocities came to light. Yet the aside suggests not only his anger at such willful ignorance, but a weariness that risks foreclosing the very nuance his work demands. 

Panh has forged a cinematic practice of extraordinary complexity—as art, public memory, even evidence. When applied to reenactment, however, these innovations throw questions of objectivity into sharp relief. Though Panh was obviously not present on the press trip, he is everywhere in the film. The very intimacy that gives his work its power—his direct experience, his compulsive return to this material—may also constrain it. This tension crystallizes in one stark detail: the figure of Pol Pot is played by the director himself.