Enemies of the People (February 10th and 11th at the Cinematheque)

[ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE screens Thursday February 10th at 8:20 p.m. and Friday February 11th at 7:30 p.m. at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]

Review by Pamela Zoslov

“At the killing field, the stench of blood was terrible. But we had to get on with it.” Such is the matter-of-fact way the horrors of Cambodia’s murderous Khmer Rouge regime is recollected by its foot soldiers in ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE, the stunning 2009 documentary by Cambodian investigative journalist Thet Sambath, with Rob Lemkin.

The documentary is the culmination of a ten-year project by Sambath, whose father, mother and brother were killed by the Khmer Rouge, the communist ruling party led by Pol Pot, which rose in 1975 in the aftermath of the U.S. bombing of Cambodia. (Audio of Nixon lying about the bombing – “We take this action for the purpose of ending the War in Vietnam” -- evokes a familiar sense of disgust.) The Khmer Rouge enforced an extreme form of social engineering on the Cambodian population, culminating in the mass slaughter of those imagined to be traitors, or in the party’s parlance, “enemies the people” – including children and women. The genocide – an estimated one to three million deaths in a population of only eight million – made it proportionally the most lethal regime of the 20^th century.

The quietly committed Sambath, looking for answers to why his family and others died in the Killing Fields, spent years visiting the countryside, patiently earning the trust of the uneducated farmers who years ago obediently slit victims’ throats by the thousands. He also gains access to the aged Nuon Chea, the party’s ideological leader, known as “Brother Number Two” to Pol Pot’s “Brother Number One.”

The agrarian onetime foot soldiers recount, in grisly but dispassionate detail, how they slaughtered and disposed of the bodies of victims, some of whom died pleading for their lives. They indicate the location of the killings and the buried bodies. “West of that kokoh tree, near the banyan tree,” under the water, contaminated with human remains. Parents were murdered in front of their children, whose screams were stifled; afterward, the children were murdered too. At one point, Sambath persuades one of the men to demonstrate on him, with a plastic knife, how the throat-slitting was done. The sight is quite chilling.

As the interviews proceed, some of the men (and one woman) express regret over their actions (“I shouldn’t have gotten involved”) and their fears of reprisal at the hands of international justice, though in fact only the top-level planners were targeted by the Khmer Rouge tribunal. In this Buddhist land, where monks walking by are a common sight, one of the killers laments that it will be a long time before he is reborn a human being.

In an act of intelligent restraint, Sambath does not reveal to the 82-year-old Nuon Chea the truth about his family until the film project is nearly at an end, and Nuon Chea is about to face prosecution for war crimes in connection with the slaughter. (He is still being held in detention.) 

In this supremely humane documentary, Nuon Chea, who still believes in the rightness of the Khmer Rouge cause, expresses regret over the deaths of his new young friend’s family, and Sambath, in turn, feels sorrow as the elderly former henchman faces arrest. With its compassion for even the most heinous murderers, the film reflects the flawed humanity by which everyone is linked – leaders, followers, victims – and suggests that the country, like so many others, was at the time gripped by a kind of bloodthirsty madness.

The horrors recounted in the movie are accented by Daniel Pemberton’s lovely native-inspired music and Lemkin’s arresting cinematography. In a particularly riveting scene, lit only by torchlight, the aging killers recall how they even engaged in cannibalism.

When his emotionally arduous film project is finally completed, Sambath has experienced a measure of personal healing, in addition to recording for his countrymen an invaluable history of an unimaginable time. 4 out of 4 stars.