Enemies of the People – Movie Review

By Ron Wilkinson Aug 2, 2010, 13:45 GMT

One of the most amazing investigative documentary films of all time. The interviews are few but of the highest quality.

Rob Lemkin wrote, directed and filmed this scary documentary about the political mass killings in Cambodia between 1976 and the fall of the Pol Pot regime in 1979. The film won a Special Jury prize at Sundance in 2010.

The film is co-directed, written and filmed by journalist Thet Sambath whose father was murdered in the Killing Fields and whose brother disappeared 1977, never to return. His mother was forced to marry a Khmer Rouge militiaman and died in childbirth in 1976.

Sambeth escaped Cambodia at the age of ten years when the regime fell in 1979. The late ‘90s found him back in Phnom Penn working as a reporter. While covering the city, he worked to get to know the children of former Khmer soldiers and commanders who were directly involved in the political killings of the 1970s.

The Khmer Rouge were country people who had little compunction about killing the city people they perceived as being rich, overfed and domineering. Sambeth’s father was a peasant and he survived in a country refugee camp and with missionaries, so he had exposure to country life.

Slowly he gained the confidence of his peers and was introduced to their fathers. From those friendships came unparalleled access to some of the most amazing interviews one could imagine.

These interviews include Pol Pot's second-in-command, Nuon Chea who is presently awaiting trial before the UN-backed Cambodian genocide tribunal. By coincidence, the first trial ended, as this review was being written, with the conviction of Kaing Guek Eav, alias Duch, the head of the infamous S-1 torture prison.

Eav was sentenced to 35 years in prison for charges that included crimes against humanity. Chea and Pol Pot together planned the overall strategy for killing the hundreds of thousands of political dissidents, or average educated professionals, which would fill the Killing Fields.

This film has a parallel to the incredible documentary of the Rwandan Hutu genocide of the Tutsi people “My neighbor My Killer” written and directed by Anne Aghion in 2009. The film has had almost no exposure or distribution, only being shown in film festivals. The crux of the film is confession and forgiveness for what is impossible to forgive.

Impossible, yet perpetrators of this horrendous slaughter stand in front of country courts and confess their crime. There is little punishment, for what can a person do to atone for such a thing? Certainly, there is nothing that can bring back the dead.

The chilling interview with Nuon Chea has a similar feeling about it. He appears only somewhat cognizant of the pain and suffering he caused and depths of his moral failure. As one listens to his story it is impossible to discern whether he is confessing or simply recounting a mission he accomplished, under orders, as a citizen of the country.

Indeed, the people killed were deemed “enemies of the state” by the country’s rulers. The first duty of a ruler is to maintain order in the country and, of course, that means staying on the throne.
 
This drives home the troubling question of the absolute nature of their crimes. If the USA executes a person for killing another person is it so far afield when a country kills those who act as traitors to the regime? In America’s Civil War neighbors killed neighbors.

Does it make a huge difference if the persons killed were killed by a cannon ball as opposed to having their throats slit by a patriotic neighbor?

By the end of the film, there is a feeling that those concerned regret what they did. However, they only regret it in the context of not having alternatives. They do not regret the fact that they accomplished what they were ordered to do, or what was very probably required to prop up the shaky regime.

In this way this film urges us to examine ourselves and ask how different we are, and how far we would have to be pushed to do what the soldiers under Pol Pot did. How far would we have to be pushed to do what the Hutus did to the Tutsis?

The trial of Nuon Chea and three other high-ranking officers who conducted the mass murders is expected to start in mid 2010. Many doubt that the frail Nuon Chea will live that long.

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Documentary
Directed by: Rob Lemkin and Thet Sambath
Written by: Rob Lemkin 
Release: July 30, 2010
MPAA: Not Rated
Runtime: 93 minutes
Country: UK / Cambodia
Language: English / Khmer
Color: Color