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Murder and massacre and mass depredation have always been part of human history, but the interest of survivors in meeting their tormentors is a relatively recent phenomenon. Cambodian journalist Thet Sambeth is in a class of his own, however, having spent most weekends of the past ten years interviewing Nuon Chea, second in command to Pol Pot, whose Khmer Rouge murdered Sambeth's father and older brother (along with nearly a quarter of the nation's population), and trying to find some sort of answer.
In Enemies of the People, Sambeth and co-director Rob Lemkin, a British investigative journalist, record his decade-long quest to get an answer from the friendly old man once referred to as "Brother Number Two." His frustration, along with so many other Cambodians, comes from the stubbornness of former Khmer Rouge soldiers and leaders, who seem to always shirk responsibility for the killing with Nazi-like glibness -- the orders always seem to come from somebody else up the chain of command. Responsibility for how the communist cadres' plan to orient Cambodian society into some kind of agrarian utopia devolved into a hellish miasma of concentration camps and slaughterhouses is never acknowledged.
But Sambeth knew that he needed to get alarmingly close to find any sort of answer: "Only the killers can tell us the truth," as he says. To do this, he needed to come to Chea and a number of other, grunt-level Khmer Rouge soldiers not with self-righteousness, but with the empathic patience of somebody who has all the time in the world. Talking about one unbelievably harrowing scene where Sambeth has one of the soldiers show him exactly how he would kill people one after the other (lying on their stomachs, hands bound behind their backs, a knife slash across the throat), he quietly narrates: "They are talking about how to kill people, but still I am smiling at them."
The closed-lipped and mild-mannered Sambeth doesn't see this as merely a news story; as he says, "This is not for journalism, this is for history." There is a remarkable lack of fury or vengeance in Sambeth, and whether it comes from a Buddhist sense of compassion or the numbness of post-traumatic stress is hard to say. It's that driving need for some kind of reckoning, even if it's just hearing the truth of the what and the why, that keeps Sambeth returning to Chea's pacific visage and refusing until the very end to tell him what happened to his own family. As the calm and respectful questioning goes on, Sambeth filming hour after quiet hour, Chea's stony silence begins to crack.
Once that happens, the distance between Chea and the soldiers whom Sambeth interviews becomes dramatically apparent. While one of the soldiers talks about nightmares and wonders how many circuits of hell his departed soul will have to take before returning to earth, Chea seems utterly unrepentant, still as much a fanatic as when he sat at Pol Pot's right hand. The only time Chea appears upset is not when he considers the hundreds of thousands murdered for being insufficiently revolutionary or suspected of being Vietnamese spies ("it was the correct solution" is his take on it) but while watching a video of Saddam Hussein's execution, which he calls "the end of a patriot in an unfair society."
Somehow, even with the scratchy archival footage of the Khmer Rouge in action (all those robotic cadres) and the devastation they caused (grim hillocks of skulls and bones), and the stark refusal of the surviving leadership to realize the enormity of suffering that they caused, this limpid, haunting, and generous film stands not so much as a damning accusation but as a striking testimonial to the implacable will of the Cambodian people.
In Enemies of the People, Sambeth and co-director Rob Lemkin, a British investigative journalist, record his decade-long quest to get an answer from the friendly old man once referred to as "Brother Number Two." His frustration, along with so many other Cambodians, comes from the stubbornness of former Khmer Rouge soldiers and leaders, who seem to always shirk responsibility for the killing with Nazi-like glibness -- the orders always seem to come from somebody else up the chain of command. Responsibility for how the communist cadres' plan to orient Cambodian society into some kind of agrarian utopia devolved into a hellish miasma of concentration camps and slaughterhouses is never acknowledged.
But Sambeth knew that he needed to get alarmingly close to find any sort of answer: "Only the killers can tell us the truth," as he says. To do this, he needed to come to Chea and a number of other, grunt-level Khmer Rouge soldiers not with self-righteousness, but with the empathic patience of somebody who has all the time in the world. Talking about one unbelievably harrowing scene where Sambeth has one of the soldiers show him exactly how he would kill people one after the other (lying on their stomachs, hands bound behind their backs, a knife slash across the throat), he quietly narrates: "They are talking about how to kill people, but still I am smiling at them."
The closed-lipped and mild-mannered Sambeth doesn't see this as merely a news story; as he says, "This is not for journalism, this is for history." There is a remarkable lack of fury or vengeance in Sambeth, and whether it comes from a Buddhist sense of compassion or the numbness of post-traumatic stress is hard to say. It's that driving need for some kind of reckoning, even if it's just hearing the truth of the what and the why, that keeps Sambeth returning to Chea's pacific visage and refusing until the very end to tell him what happened to his own family. As the calm and respectful questioning goes on, Sambeth filming hour after quiet hour, Chea's stony silence begins to crack.
Once that happens, the distance between Chea and the soldiers whom Sambeth interviews becomes dramatically apparent. While one of the soldiers talks about nightmares and wonders how many circuits of hell his departed soul will have to take before returning to earth, Chea seems utterly unrepentant, still as much a fanatic as when he sat at Pol Pot's right hand. The only time Chea appears upset is not when he considers the hundreds of thousands murdered for being insufficiently revolutionary or suspected of being Vietnamese spies ("it was the correct solution" is his take on it) but while watching a video of Saddam Hussein's execution, which he calls "the end of a patriot in an unfair society."
Somehow, even with the scratchy archival footage of the Khmer Rouge in action (all those robotic cadres) and the devastation they caused (grim hillocks of skulls and bones), and the stark refusal of the surviving leadership to realize the enormity of suffering that they caused, this limpid, haunting, and generous film stands not so much as a damning accusation but as a striking testimonial to the implacable will of the Cambodian people.
