Cambodian Filmmaker Rithy Panh Recalls The Genocide

Brut India

Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh survived the genocide carried out by the Khmer Rouge regime. Since then, he has devoted his life and career to keep the memory of those who died alive.  At the Cannes film festival, he tells Brut his story.

Transcript

00:00What surrounded me was death, it was destruction.

00:11I don't know if you can imagine that in a few days,

00:15a city of two million inhabitants will be empty in two days.

00:31The city of two million inhabitants will be empty in two days.

00:43After that, schools are closed,

00:46there are no more tickets, there are no more ticket bans,

00:50we can't travel, we can't move around,

00:53there are no more hospitals,

00:56in the evacuation or deportation of people from Phnom Penh,

00:59even the hospitals,

01:01even the people who are sick have to leave the hospitals.

01:04So it's violence at night.

01:07And then the ration decreases.

01:10Before, the ration was a box of Nestle,

01:16a box of Nestle,

01:18a box of concentrated rice for one person.

01:22Now it's a box for more than 25-26 people.

01:29I was young, but I wasn't quite young,

01:33but I wasn't an adult either.

01:36I was 14 years old,

01:39and normally you train a human being.

02:23Once again, we can't say everything, we can't understand everything,

02:27but if we already have a path,

02:30if we have a little clue here and there,

02:32maybe we'll be able to get out of it.

02:35You would tell me that we don't have that in the history of Cambodia.

02:40Yes, it's only four years,

02:43it's a much longer story than that.

02:46But it's a terrible four years,

02:48and if those four years are worked,

02:51we can turn the page.

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