RETURN TO : THE KILLING FIELDS : Director Roland Joffe takes his 1984 film to Cambodia to remind the world of atrocities

On Aug. 3, I arrived in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, as a member of a delegation that showed “The Killing Fields” to the very people whose suffering is depicted in the 1984 film. Among those invited were Roland Joffe, the director of the film, and Sydney Schanberg, the former New York Times journalist who was the protagonist of the story. Joffe had never been here, having shot the film in Thailand, and Schanberg was returning for the first time since he was evacuated in 1975.

Our delegation had been put together by Richard Walden, president of Operation California. He was the first American aid person to enter Cambodia in 1979, and has returned 25 times with donations of medicine and medical supplies. We brought medicine for Cambodian and Vietnamese orphanages and hospitals. But we also brought one thing more: The power of a film.

In 1980, producer David Puttnam bought the rights to an article written by Schanberg for the New York Times Magazine. In it, Schanberg told the story of covering Cambodia for his paper as the country was about to capitulate to the brutal Khmer Rouge forces, led by the despot Pol Pot. He wrote of his friendship and love for his Cambodian aide Dith Pran, how they took refuge in the French Embassy as the city was about to fall, and how he was able to flee and Pran wasn’t.

Back in the states, Schanberg tried desperately to find Pran after he disappeared into the black hole that Cambodia had become. Schanberg won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the event, and Pran barely survived the three years of starvation and beatings by his captors. In the film, Sam Waterston played Schanberg and Dr. Haing Ngor appeared as Pran.

Until the movie’s release, few in the world knew what had taken place in Cambodia from 1975, after the last foreigner left, until 1979 when the invading Vietnamese overthrew the Khmer Rouge, forcing Pol Pot from power. A darkness had enveloped the land; there was no news. Only a few exhausted, ragged stragglers lucky enough to escape told tales of beheadings and forced labor, of a cadre of young Maoists whose brutality knew no equal, whose fanatic goal was to kill anything that smacked of Western-tainted progress.

So, when the film burst on the scene, its disturbing depiction of the atrocity rocked audiences. The world finally learned of the genocide, the murder of at least 1 million, and perhaps 2 million or 3 million people.

And now it could happen again.

The Vietnamese, a mixed blessing, but protective presence, are leaving at the end of this month. This will leave a power vacuum in the country and the shaky government will be vulnerable to some 40,000 Khmer Rouge troops still massed at the Thai border, where they have been for the past 10 years. And Pol Pot, 64, is still at large. It is precarious, and the Cambodians are nervous. A peace conference has been under way in Paris, with 20 nations attempting to decide the country’s destiny, considering the unthinkable: should the Khmer Rouge be included in the government?

So Operation California chose this time to show the film to the Cambodians, and to remind the world what happened. “The Killing Fields” is the strongest tool there is, in its brutal dramatization of life under the Khmer Rouge. It has been seen on videocassettes in Cambodia by a limited number of people, but this was the first time the population was able to see the chronicle of their bloody history on the wide screen, in a theater.

On our first day, we make the obligatory visits to several ministries. The woman Foreign Ministry press officer offers her appreciation to Joffe for “making the film, hoping it will persuade people in the world how important it is to prevent Pol Pot from coming to power again.”

She looks hard at Joffe with eyes of unspeakable sadness. “There was no way for us to express feelings then,” she says, “there was no laughter, no smiles. Now, people so want to enjoy life. They want to dance, dress in fine colors. Under Pol Pot, we dressed only in black.”

Joffe says, gently, “It is beautiful to see life going on in the city. See the young people smiling.”

In the afternoon we go to the National Theater where the first invited showing of the film is scheduled for members of ministries and government workers.

Schanberg and Joffe address the packed house from the stage. Schanberg speaks about how happy he is “to be coming home.”

Joffe asks the audience when they are watching the film “to forgive that it wasn’t made in Cambodia. Remember that many people outside did care about the experiences you went through.” He explains that it is a film about “suffering, friendship, love, courage, survival and hope. I hope you will feel as I do, that we should look to the future as optimistically as we can.”

“I hope very much that soon you will be able to have as a national symbol, the bird, the Phoenix, which was consumed by flames and then was born again. I hope and pray this shall apply to you.”

An antiquated movie projector struggles to do justice to the print Joffe has brought. Cambodian actors recite the translated dialogue into microphones simultaneously with the action. The audience is restive, then riveted to the screen.

After the screening, people move slowly to the doors. Some are not anxious to share their reactions, but I speak at length with a woman in her 30s. She is tiny. Delicate. Two of her hands could fit into one of mine. These hands, she tells me, from dawn to dusk, cut bamboo in the jungles, toiled in the rice fields under Pol Pot. Her story rushes out.

“The movie tells my story. It is 12 years now and I still see it, my father’s face when they took him away. We were in a camp in the countryside, like in the film. He didn’t come back for 15 minutes, then half an hour, one hour. He didn’t come back. It was raining. I kept thinking he has nothing with him, he’ll be under the rain in the dark. I cried the whole night. I wanted to die. I never saw him again. Six months later on April 13, my mother passed away of malaria. There was no medicine. She is still in a grave in the jungle. Fifty members of my family died. Uncles, aunts, nieces, nephews. I try to forget, but I can’t. The scene is in front of my eyes. I dream every night of my father and mother. We live in tears. It is hard to smile. Our eyes may, but the cry is in our hearts. I am glad the world now learns of what happened to us from the film, and I understand you cannot tell everything on the screen. But for me, it was 1% of the real thing.”

Later, when speaking about the sensitivity of working with Cambodians on the film, Joffe observed, “I learned that in order to survive they had to displace, compartmentalize their feelings. Some who played Khmer Rouge soldiers began to recognize that the only way they had been coping with their trauma had been to put it out of their minds. They, for the most part, were stoic. And then one day on the set we circulated a reconstructed newspaper with the date, 1973. In it, there was a tiny news item. A simple everyday reminder of what life had been like before Pol Pot. And they dissolved into tears. It was a minute remembrance that reminded them that there was such a life and that it had once existed.”

The next day, we visit one of the actual Killing Fields, a half hour outside the city. Choeung Ek was a charnel house, the execution grounds. Cows graze here now, around the graves. Children play nearby. On a previous visit with Operation California five years ago, we saw an open bamboo structure housing hundreds of skulls and bones that had been found under the swollen earth, fertilized by the flesh of the murdered. The image of one skull whose eye sockets were still shrouded by a red blindfold haunted me for years. Today, there is a handsome monument in its place, tall, greeting the sky. And the remains are now behind glass, out of the bleaching rays of the sun.

Separately, each with our own thoughts, our own terrors, we walk silently. Joffe’s hands are clasped, Prince Philip style, behind his back. We stop at each gaping hole. A sign says “Mass grave of more than 100 victims. Children and women whose majority were naked.” Another announces a “Mass grave of 166 victims without heads.”

We look at one another.

Joffe says, “The Khmer Rouge gave up love and affection . . . They encouraged children to turn against their parents, to have them killed. It is so puzzling. Pol Pot and the leaders were intellectuals who had studied in Paris, who had had contact with civilization. It is they who conceived of this. Those intellectuals lost their sense of reality, and built one of their own. This was not genocide to them, but a purification.”

He looks about at the peaceful scene. Massive graves scarring the earth juxtaposed with the rich green of the land. Joffe talks about the relentless American bombing from 1970 to 1973 that may well have exacerbated the hostility of the rural followers of the Khmer Rouge.

“I would like Kissinger to come here and ask himself, as an academic, ponder what it was that he did. I used to think about this when I was filming. What was it like living here with this kind of land and wind, this kind of air, and then suddenly something comes out of the sky that you can’t see. Some American flying up there who didn’t know what he was bombing. ‘Why is this raining from the sky,’ you would ask. ‘Is this mixed up with magic?’ And then the anger came.”

At every step on this trip, we ask of each other, of the Cambodians, of ourselves. How could this happen? How could a people go bad? Turn on their brothers with such vengeance, such barbarism?

Joffe, who has obviously mulled these questions over and over, talks about “the setting up of a pathological society that legitimized what it was doing . . . legitimized cruelty.” . . . Pol Pot’s goal, to outdo China’s Cultural Revolution, to accomplish in one year what Mao tried to do in 20.

Joffe says: “There is a scene in the film where an 11-year-old Thai girl, playing the part of a guard, had to pull Haing Ngor’s plant--forbidden by the Khmer Rouge--out of the ground. During the filming, Ngor turned white. ‘I can’t continue.’ He was terrified. ‘She is Khmer Rouge. I recognize the look.”’

Joffe continues: “I asked him to do it again, and this time I watched her face. She picked up the plant, and this gentle girl was transformed. She looked at him with the face of the Khmer Rouge. At the end of the scene, the girl walked off, sweet again. She’d never been in that position of total power over an adult before. A Western child is given little bits of power earlier in life, but in that moment this Eastern child turned her conception of power on its head. For an instant I saw the shortcut, how the Khmer Rouge altered psychology.”

Sydney Schanberg is gray now, his beard tinged with white, his eyes burning. I have kept my distance from him on this trip, respecting his private demons. One night in a restaurant, a waiter recognizes him from the old days. The man had survived. It was unnerving, unsettling.

At the press conference in Bangkok before we arrived in Phnom Penh, Schanberg had said that it felt right to go back now. “It is the fear that we all share that the Khmer Rouge will come back,” he said. “That horrible and awesome thought. The film is a record of what they did. We cannot pretend it didn’t happen.” He was eloquent in his outrage at the acceptance of the Khmer Rouge at the United Nations. “Why isn’t the world as shocked by the Khmer Rouge as they were by the Nazis? The Khmer Rouge flag flies outside the U.N. now. This would be like flying the Swastika as the flag for Germany.”

He is 55 now. He was 41 in 1975 when Phnom Penh fell. Sam Waterston’s intensity, his short temper, his brooding are indelibly etched in our minds. Schanberg himself does not seem the sentimental man, and there is an aloofness about him that dissipates as you get to know him better. He keeps you at bay with a quip, or quick retort, and then will suddenly reveal something that touches you to the core. In his original New York Times piece he was unsparing of himself. He confessed his pride, neglect of his family, ambition, his deep attachment to his friend Pran, his guilt at leaving him behind. A complicated man whom we see here in a complicated situation.

The following day we go to Tuol Sleng, the dreaded torture and interrogation center housed in a former high school. It is now a museum, left just as it was. There were only seven victims alive when the Vietnamese entered. The classrooms were places of torture, tiny cubicles set up where prisoners were chained to the floor. It is dusk when we visit and the rooms are losing their light. There are hundreds of pictures of victims on the walls. Torturers seem to take such pains to chronicle their atrocities. These photos were taken right before execution, smashed-in faces, terrified eyes.

“I can’t see the faces clearly. Is there a book of names?” Schanberg asks our interpreter Heng Chhay. “I want to see if any of my friends are on the wall.”

This is a hard place to be. I feel dizzy. I touch the wall for balance. And I have been here before.

But Schanberg, the master reporter, takes over. He begins his questioning Heng . Gently at first. “Where were you living when they came for you the day of the evacuation? You walked where? Across the bridge? Who was with you?” Quietly, slowly, with a staccato rhythm, he probes, pushes, presses for details.

“Then where did you go? Did you take a boat? Were you separated from your family? What work did you do when you got to the camp?”

“Every night I was frightened,” Heng says, “It’s when they would take people away. The man on my left, he cried out, ‘Why do you arrest me?’ The Pol Pot soldiers say nothing.”

“Were you there the whole time in that area? Where were you during the liberation? What condition were you in?” Schanberg is relentless. Heng keeps up with the barrage and falters only when he tells about his aunt. “It was 1977, the worst year. She got sick. And they wouldn’t help her. They took her to the so-called hospital and gave her an intravenous injection of normal river water. And she cried out, shouted for me and there was no one there. I asked permission of the chief to see her. He said no. One hour later, she died, in agony. Of convulsions.”

“Do you hate them?”

“They are guilty of genocide.”

“What would you do if one of them came here now?”

“I would say, why did you kill your own people? You are crazy. Your body is Khmer (Cambodian) but your heart is not. You are not a human being.”

Heng has kept the tears back too long. They spill from his eyes.

“I am sorry to make you think back like that,” Schanberg says, “For both of us.”

Softly, Heng says, “These memories are not good.”

Schanberg, deeply moved, takes his hand. They walk away together to regain composure.

(Forgive me, Sydney, for eavesdropping on your interview.)

Finally, it is the big day. The film opens to the public. We are oblivious to the oppressive heat as we arrive in front of the 900-seat theater in the center of the city. We are greeted by gridlock, hundreds of people lined up to get into the theater, a cacophony of chatter, children crying, the loudspeaker from the cinema blaring the sound track of the film. A mob scene. People are climbing over one another’s shoulders to get inside. Only one narrow door is open in order to control the crowd.

On top of the building is a socialist-realist style painting depicting a familiar scene from the film; Khmer Rouge soldiers menacing Sam Waterston whose hands reach for the sky; Haing Ngor’s hands are placed together as in prayer, pleading for their lives. The colors in the painting are bright, and the words on the sign proclaim that this film stars the award-winning Cambodian actor, Haing Ngor. This is a rare moment of “deep pride, of inordinate self-esteem for these people,” Joffe says, beaming. “It’s like a vitamin B-12 shot for the country.”

Our group stands in awe outside the theater in the middle of the street. There are cars in the city now. Pol Pot’s soldiers had “killed” all the cars, had taken hatchets to them as symbols of “decadence.” Today, their horns, impatient, honk incessantly at us and the crowds.

I watch Joffe and Schanberg as they look up at the painting promoting the film. I watch them catch their breath at the lines upon lines of men and women, some holding children, waiting to enter the theater. It is pandemonium, but somehow under control.

We are told that 5,000 people viewed the film this first day of showing (it was scheduled to play indefinitely). People in line tell us they want their children to remember “Pol Pot’s Time” when their country suffered so.

What becomes clear to me from an experience such as this is that as medieval, as barbaric as the behavior of the Khmer Rouge was, depicted faithfully in “The Killing Fields,” the seeds of that evil are in all of us. Evil does exist. I do believe we are all capable of such excess, but we exercise control, choice, restraint, love, to check the potential. The same hatred exploded with such ferocity in the Holocaust (Nazi eyes were Khmer Rouge eyes), in the French and Russian Revolutions, by the Klan, Skinheads, South Africans torturing children, the French in Algeria, fresh-faced Americans at My Lai, nice Jewish boys on the West Bank.

“This could happen anywhere in the world,” Joffe says.

It is in all of us. That capability is the chilling message of “The Killing Fields” in Cambodia. It rings in my ears. We must all be on guard.

Watching Joffe watching the Cambodians watching his film is to observe a rare moment of fulfillment for a director, seeing his work come full circle. To see the film with him in this setting, to hear the Cambodian language coming out of the actors’ mouths, we feel the intense power of the medium.

We hear a mass moan sweep over the audience when Haing Ngor as Dith Pran pleads for Schanberg’s life, a rumbling, a gasping at the image of the forced mass exodus from the city, a terrible silence at the first shot of a Khmer Rouge labor camp, and, at the end, when Schanberg finally finds Pran in the Thai refugee camp, when he picks him up, embraces him, the groan swells to a roar in the theater.

And the tears glisten in Roland Joffe’s eyes.