Enemies of the People

The film says the Khmer Rouge killed close to two million people in Cambodia in the late seventies. The journalist Thet Sambath spent ten years of his life winning the trust of the women and men who carried out the killings. He spoke with many of them, from foot soldiers who cut throats to the man known as Pol Pot’s right hand, and gathered testimony never recorded before. Sambath did this for a personal reason; he lost his parents and his siblings in those years. In doing it he neglected his own family for years, and the film shows that cost too. The documentary chooses to let the perpetrators speak and puts what they say in front of the viewer as it is. The question of why is the main axis of the account; what happened is already known, what is sought is the reason. The ninety three minute British documentary by Rob Lemkin and Thet Sambath was completed in 2009.