In this original and devastating film, Rithy Panh uses clay figurines to re-enact the atrocities perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979. Starting from his own family story, Rithy Panh reconstructs the Cambodia of his childhood and its sudden transformation in a concentrationary nightmare in which most of his loved ones perished one by one, together with one quarter of the country’s population. This is a story that belongs to the victims, and not to the executioners. A measured and poetic narrator played by the French-Cambodian mathematician and actor Randal Douc, as well as a soundtrack of old Cambodian songs give these victim their voice – and stand in stark contrast with the haunting silence of the missing images reconstructed out of dirt and cloth patches. In their somber dioramas, the melancholy clay miniatures appear charged with emotions and individuality, unlike the disconcerting Khmer Rouge appearing in old propaganda films. This hybrid and personal film is an act of restitution: official images are undermined by the private memory of victims which preserves, indelibly, what the Pol Pot regime wanted to erase.
