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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
S21: THE KHMER ROUGE KILLING MACHINE
A seemingly straightforward yet intricately directed meditation on man's inhumanity to man,
S21 is a beautifully made documentary. Under the pretense of offering a rational and
logical explanation for the unexplainable, director Rithy Panh gently leads the audience through
the unfathomable terrain of torture and genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Through
Panh’s obsessive interest in the tiniest of details, we reach so far into the darkness we can
glimpse, almost comprehend, the final acts of murder.
S21, a notorious Khmer prison now a genocide museum, is literally re-inhabited as Panh reunites
a handful of prison guards with two - perhaps the only two - survivors. At the heart of the film is
Panh’s main protagonist, painter Vann Nath, Panh’s conscience and guide. Nath's paintings
bear witness for those who died and of the horrors in S21. While Nath seems to have found some
peace through his art, he also knows that his talent saved his life - his portraits pleased his captors.
Other artists failed to please and were killed. "Some painters were better than me... What a sad
fate." Through Panh’s lens we watch the prison guards reenact their deeply inculcated
thoughts and duties. But it is Nath who pushes his captors to move beyond rationalizations to
acknowledge that the enemy they tortured and ultimately killed were simply their neighbors, their
fellow countrymen, women and children. And together we are led to a place of true horror, where
at one particular moment in time it made perfect sense to take men, one at a time, out into the night, hit them with a lead pipe, cut their throats and
dump their bodies in a putrid mass grave. Jane C. Wagner, director/producer (Emmy and Sundance Grand Jury Prize winning Girls Like Us and the Sundance Best Short Film Award winning Tom's Flesh)
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