Excerpts from an interview with Rithy Panh
conducted by filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer and published in Killer Images.
RP: I met Paul, who does the re-enactment in the film, in his native village. And I understood that this man wanted very much to explain what he had done at S21. But he couldn't get round to explaining it properly, all his phrases were cut off. So at a certain moment I brought him a map of the camp. and so he said, "Oh yes, I was a guard in this part of the building." So then he was able to explain, but in doing that he made the gestures that you see in the film, which completed the phrases he couldn't discuss. And it's then that I discovered that there was another memory, which is the bodily memory. So it may be 20 years later, but survivors would talk about pains they feel in certain areas of their body, even if it was a long time ago. But you find the same things with the former guards. Sometimes the violence is so strong that words don't suffice to describe it. And also that violence may be so strong that the words become inaudible.
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RP: Because of one’s belief in humanity, the challenge is to bring the torturers back to humanity. And that’s done by the action of testifying. You have to create the most favorable conditions for those testimonies… One principle, which I state right from the beginning, is that I am not a judge and I am not part of any group. I was against them, the torturers who were participating in the film, and it was important that they knew what side I was on. And I said also that I would accept everything that they said, and would take everything in that they said. But on one condition that I do not find proof to the contrary of what they say….
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JO: I think it is really fascinating and important in that the film gives us a glimpse into a contradiction between belief and knowledge, a contradiction between what the guards believe and what is helpful for them to believe, to get through their daily lives, perhaps not in a fully human state. And it's most clear to me in that moment where they talk about the interrogations. it's clear that they believe, in a way, at least they claim to believe these confessions, that they force the prisoners to say. So they force the prisoners to lie,, but then the lies become somehow things that they can believe in.