S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine

There was a school in Phnom Penh called Tuol Sleng. The Khmer Rouge turned it into a prison called S-21; of the tens of thousands of people brought there, very few came out alive. Years later Rithy Panh took two things back into that building together: a few survivors, and the former guards who had worked there. The camera puts them face to face in the same rooms and waits for them to speak. The film's method lies here: Panh asks the guards to act out again, in the empty rooms, what they used to do. The men do it; the orders, the walking, the sounds of locks, all repeated with nobody there, and the body remembers. One of the survivors, the painter Vann Nath, stands in front of them and asks the same question: why. The documentary gives no answer, because there is none; what it shows is that people who did that work can still describe it as part of a system. A hundred and one minutes.