S21, la machine de mort khmère rouge (S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine). 2003. Australia/Belgium/Cambodia/Canada/Czech Republic/Finland/France/Switzerland. Directed by Rithy Panh. DCP. In Khmer, Vietnamese; English subtitles. 101 min.
An inspiration for Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing and Barbet Schroeder’s The Venerable W., Rithy Panh’s sober yet devastating documentary brings two survivors of the Khmer Rouge’s secret detention camp S21 together with their former captors. Today a genocide museum, Tuol Sieng prison (code-named “S21”) was a compound of secondary schools repurposed for the interrogation, torture, and execution of political prisoners, most of whom were ordinary Cambodians forced into confessing imagined acts of treason and conspiracy that included writing love letters (see Panh’s Bophana: A Cambodian Tragedy), wearing eyeglasses (dangerous intellectuals!), or foraging for tree bark and frogs to feed their starving children. Out of some 17,000 prisoners tortured and murdered at S21 between 1975 and 1979, only 12 specially exempted adults were spared death. Two of them, now elderly, appear in Panh’s film—Vann Nath, who was forced to paint portraits of Pol Pot, and Chum Mey, who repaired sewing machines—standing face to face with the guards, interrogators, doctor, and photographer who confess, stoically or defensively, to the atrocities they committed, some as young as 12 at the time. Courtesy INA