Orphan of the collective The Elimination by Rithy Panh

Asia Times ^ | 05/31/2013 | Joe Freeman

[TexGrill]

PHNOM PENH - Cambodian-born filmmaker Rithy Panh has built a career out of documenting life in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia. His topics may be set well after the killings, but they always seem to be playing out in the shadows of history, with one eye on the past and one in the present. His film Site 2 explores the lives of a Cambodian family of refugees who fled the Khmer Rouge's terror to the relative safety of a border camp in Thailand. In The Land of the Wandering Souls, development clashes with buried secrets when laborers working on a project to build a fiber optic

cable stumble across human remains.

His documentary, S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, investigates the inner workings of a high school-turned-torture center in Phnom Penh. In the film, former prisoners and guards have a macabre reunion at S-21, or Tuol Sleng, now a popular tourist site advertised on several tuk-tuks throughout the city. They visit decaying brick cells and are asked to explain the methods that contributed to the deaths of about 13,000 Cambodians, who were either killed at the center or driven to the "Killing Fields" of Choeung Ek. Torturers show how they did their job, in full view of the camera.

[TexGrill]

Sounds like an interesting book.