DON’T JUST WATCH IT – READ IT!

Posted on : August 7, 2023
Author : GURLEEN KAUR

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FILM NAME: THE KILLING FIELDS

DIRECTOR: ROLAND JOFFE

WRITER: BRUCE ROBINSON

GENRE: BIOGRAPHY, HISTORY AND WAR

YEAR: 1984

 

The story “The Killing Fields” is a two hour, twenty one minute war drama film. When the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh in 1975, many thought that the killing would end. Instead it started a long nightmare in which three million Cambodians would die in the “Killing Fields”. The story revolves around a journalist trapped in Cambodia during the tyrant Pol Pot’s bloody ‘Year Zero’ cleansing campaign which claimed the lives of two million ‘undesirable’ civilians.

 

THE HISTORICAL BACKDROP TO THE FILM

From 1975 till 1979, Pol Pot led the Khmer Rouge political party in a reign of violence, fear and brutality over Cambodia. An attempt to form a Communist peasant farming society resulted in the deaths of 25% of the total population for reasons like starvation, over work and executions. Inspired by Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in Communist China, Pol Pot attempted to ‘purify Cambodia’ of western culture, city life and religion. Different ethnic groups and all those considered to be of the “old society”, intellectuals, former government officials and Buddhist monks were murdered.

“What is rotten must be removed” was a slogan proclaimed throughout the Khmer Rouge era. More than 2, 00,000 Cambodians nationwide were declared enemies of the State and were thereafter executed by the Khmer Rouge during their three years of tyrant rule.

The “Killing Fields” technically refers to a number of sites that were used for mass executions and burials of people killed by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime in the late 1970s. Because the regime was killing so many people who were considered in appropriate for the new society that was being created, the murders needed to be cheap and less expensive. They were quiet literally carried out in the fields, often using farming tools or swords to save bullets. The victims were then buried in shallow graves in the fields. Before killing the ‘undesirables’, the Khmer Rouge tortured and extracted written confessions from their victims. In this way the Khmer Rouge documented their own atrocities. The victim’s photographs and confessions later provided and served as physical evidences. A visit to the former “Killing Fields” is a harrowing, emotional and draining but it does offers a compelling insight into a fraction of the atrocities that took place across the country under the genocidal regime.

 

STORY LINE

The Killing Fields is an epic story of friendship and survival produced by David Puttman and directed by Roland Joffe. It is based on a biography titled “The Death and Life of Dith Pran” by Sydney Schanberg. The story is based on a New York Times reporter, Sydney Schanberg who is on an assignment to cover the Cambodian civil war with the help of a local interpreter Dith Pran and an American photo journalist Al Rockoff. Sam Waterson plays Sydney Schanberg whose war coverage entraps him and his journalist, Dith Pran played by Dr Haing S Ngor. Together they cover some of the tragedy and madness of the war. When the American forces leave, Dith Pran sends his family with them but stays behind himself to help Schanberg cover the event. As an American, Schanberg is seen to be facing no difficulty in leaving the Communist country but the situation is seen to be different for Pran as he is a native and the Khmer Rouge was still in control and power. Dith Pran is eventually sentenced to labor camps where he endures severe starvation and torture before he escapes to Thailand. The character played by Ngor is also seen to have witnessed and endured the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge and saw his moving as a way of bringing his nation’s tragic ordeal to light. The Killing Fields is a story about an American and a Cambodian witnessing the fall off the old regime and the unlikely survival of the Cambodian man who stays behind and lives through the horrors of the regime’s murderous rule.

 

The title itself has a semantic meaning, for me it is a metaphor. It is a very compelling and interesting field of nonfiction that tells us the story of the two reporters as they try to survive in Cambodia. It shows the horror of Khmer Rouge through intense descriptions and an interesting story telling.  In my view the film succeeds at many levels and fails at one or two. As a film, “The Killing Fields “is moving meticulously and persuasively. Its depiction of the relationship between the New York Times correspondent in Phnom Penh in 1973-1975 and his Cambodian assistant shows them in the words of one reviewer as “roaring in between the adventure of war and revolution”. The film roughly divides itself into parts of two, the first showcasing Pran and Schanberg together and the second half depicting them apart with Schanberg in the United States agonizing about his friend while Pran is concealing his past and managing to survive as a laborer in Democratic Kampuchea. At the end of the film, after the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, Pran and Schanberg are reunited in a refugee camp on the Thailand Cambodia border.

In my view the film can thus be viewed multiple times with having different impacts on each of us individual beings. The gradual character building and storyline development makes this a creative work of the nonfiction world of literature. The film has rightfully been awarded with three Oscars to its name along with twenty one wins and twenty two nominations. Despite tackling war based trauma, atrocities and racism, the film manages to leave a deep rooted impact in a meaningful way on each of its viewers. I would highly recommend everybody to watch this film if they are interested in the genres of Asian history and war.

 

 

 

 

 

REFERENCES

Roland Joffe (Director). (1984). The Killing Fields (Warner Bros, Columbia Pictures).

“The Killing Fields” https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087553/

“The Killing Fields” https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/killing_fields

“The Killing Fields” https://www.warnerbros.com/movies/killing-fields

D P Chandler. (1986). “The Killing Fields and Perceptions of the Cambodian History” https://www.jstor.org/stable/2759005

 

GURLEEN KAUR

INTERN, ASIA IN GLOBAL AFFAIRS

 

The originality of the content and the opinions expressed within the content are solely the author’s and do not reflect the opinions and beliefs of the website.