Rendez-vous avec Pol Pot

For much of his career, Rithy Panh has explored symbols and incarnations, documentary theatricality and the memories contained within gestures and bodies to reconstruct and thus grasp Cambodia’s traumatic past. However, when words, images, archives and memory are incapable of reconstructing what is broken, there is no other choice but to draw on fiction to try better comprehend history. RENDEZ-VOUS AVEC POL POT thus embraces fiction to reconstruct the interview that three French journalists conducted with the Cambodian leader in 1973. Using actors and wooden figures interspersed with archive material, Panh makes the paranoia, terror, propaganda and daily routines of that visit painfully tangible: timeouts, speeches by converts, rigid control mechanism and unrelenting heat. The film is a portrait of the oppressive atmosphere that surrounds unquestioned power. As in his previous films, Panh returns to the historical setting and shows us exclusively what the journalists saw. The images of what happened in the country are still denied to us, just as they were to the journalists. Above all RENDEZVOUS AVEC POL POT is a film about what could not, and still cannot, be filmed. (Gonzalo de Pedro)

Rithy Pahn: CAMBODIA: BETWEEN WAR AND PEACE (1991), RICE PEOPLE (NEAK SRE) (1994), BOPHANA: A CAMBODIAN TRAGEDY (1996), THE LAND OF THE WANDERING SOULS (2000), S-21: THE KHMER ROUGE KILLING MACHINE (2003), THE PEOPLE OF ANGKOR (2003), THE BURNT THEATRE (2005), PAPER CANNOT WRAP UP EMBERS (2007), THE SEA WALL (2008), GIBIER D’ÉLEVAGE (2011), DUCH, MASTER OF THE FORGES OF HELL (2012), THE MISSING PICTURE (2013), LA FRANCE EST NOTRE PATRIE (2015), EXILE (2016), GRAVES WITHOUT A NAME (2018), IRRADIATED (2020)