Meeting with Pol Pot

Rithy Panh's 2024 film draws on Elizabeth Becker's 1986 book When the War Was Over. In 1978 three Westerners enter Democratic Kampuchea at the invitation of the Khmer Rouge to conduct an exclusive interview with Pol Pot; everything they are shown is staged, while behind the screen the regime is collapsing and war with Vietnam is approaching. Panh rebuilds that real journey through fictional characters. On Becker's actual trip she travelled with the journalist Richard Dudman and Malcolm Caldwell, an academic who defended the Khmer Rouge; Caldwell was shot dead during the visit and the killing has never been explained. Panh's narrative places that figure at the centre as the cost of ideological blindness. The director lost his own family under the Khmer Rouge, and his method of mixing archive footage with clay figures is familiar from his earlier work. Who it's for: viewers interested in Cambodian history, Rithy Panh's cinema, and the relationship between journalism and propaganda. Who it's not for: anyone avoiding images of genocide and mass death, or uncomfortable with documentary and fiction being mixed.