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Cambodia’s most celebrated filmmaker Rithy Panh has devoted his career to exploring the legacy of the Khmer Rouge through cinema. The genocidal regime, led by the infamous Communist and ethnonationalist Pol Pot, ruled the nation from 1975 to 1979 — and the damage that it inflicted continues to shape Cambodia to this day.
Though best known as a documentarian, Panh’s latest work, “Meeting with Pol Pot,” is a fictionalized story that examines the Khmer Rouge from the point of view of journalists covering the war. The film is an adaptation of Elizabeth Becker’s memoir “When the War Was Over,” which shows three French journalists who travel to Cambodia to interview the dictator, all without realizing the atrocities his regime was perpetuating.
“Meeting with Pol Pot,” which is Cambodia’s official submission for the 97th Academy Awards, debuted in the Cannes Premiere section at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. It stars Irène Jacob, Grégoire Colin, Cyril Gueï, Bunhok Lim, and Somaline Mao.
An official synopsis for the film reads, “Three French journalists are invited by the Khmer Rouge to conduct an exclusive interview of the regime’s leader, Pol Pot. The country seems ideal. But behind the Potemkin village, the Khmer Rouge regime is declining and the war with Vietnam threatens to invade the country. The regime is looking for culprits, secretly carrying out a large scale genocide. Under the eyes of the journalists, the beautiful picture cracks, revealing the horror. Their journey progressively turns into a nightmare.”
In a press statement provided to IndieWire, Panh explained that the film was partially conceived as an attempt to explore changes in the field of journalism that may have left the world less informed about global events than it once was.
“In the film, the aim was both to talk about the Khmer Rouge and to question the role of the journalist in the field, which is tending to disappear,” Panh said. “These days, we are more concerned with immediacy, working on breaking news rather than substance. Newsrooms are more reluctant to send someone out into the field for three or four weeks. The film echoes these current events and reminds us that the absence of information, disinformation, and manipulation of information — which are strategies for certain governments — constitute a danger, a vice in which we are caught. Then as now.”
Strand Releasing will release “Meeting with Pol Pot” in North American theaters in 2025. Watch the trailer, an IndieWire exclusive, below.
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