I first saw The Killing Fields when I was at university.
I’d heard of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, just as I’d heard of Hitler and the Holocaust. Intellectually I knew that individuals, and that groups of humans, could be cruel, even evil. That a charismatic leader could take insecurities and festering resentments and turn them into absolute horror.
But this movie, The Killing Fields, the story of Dith Pran, a journalist who survived the Khmer Rouge regime, somehow made it real. This movie is at its heart the story of a friendship: between Dith Prah, a Cambodian interpreter, and Sydney Schanberg, a New York Times reporter who was in Phnom Penh when the Khmer Rouge claimed victory and took control of Cambodia. Schanberg made it back to the United States; Pran did not.
Over the next four years, Pran survived the brutality and the capriciousness of the Khmer Rouge regime while around him, 1.5 to 2 million people–almost a quarter of the pre-Khmer Rouge population of Cambodia–were tortured, murdered, or died of starvation and buried in mass graves. Somehow he escaped and made his way to a refugee camp in Thailand, where he was reunited with Schanberg. Pran became a photojournalist for the New York Times and never stopped campaigning on behalf of the victims of the Khmer Rouge regime.
I can’t watch The Killing Fields without crying, just as I cannot watch Boys Don’t Cry without crying. It’s such an amazing depiction of the evil within humanity, and because it’s such a personal story, it breaks through the distance with the viewer and makes it real. I’m touched by the courage and the determination of people like Dith Pran and Haing S. Ngor, who were able to survive this experience and share it with us.
Talk to me!