A tragic Cambodian tale

A unique documentary about the Cambodian genocide, centring on S21, the country's main security bureau, in which 17,000 so-called enemies of the people were imprisoned and tortured between 1975 and 1979. The director takes two survivors back to the building to confront their former guards. The results are shocking.

The survivors speak, but the guards are largely wordless; the survivors seem old, the guards young; the survivors are angry, the guards far from toadying - just about every contradiction and struggle is here. The language is unforgettable. "My heart never stopped my brain," says one guard. "He was guilty of a dreamer's feelings," says another of a prisoner who confessed to once having been in love:

Like Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, the film delivers testimony, bears witness, but there is a touch of the bizarre here too. Guards actually re-enact longremembered scenes of locking up starving and wounded inmates for the night. Except now the rooms are entirely empty.

S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine
Cert: NC