Excellent Piece for Students of History

Rating: Null/10 (27 September 2011)

The movie The Killing Fields is a dramatized version of real events that happened in the 1970's in South East Asia. In it, a small cadre of reporters witness the American bombings in Cambodia, followed by the overthrow of the Cambodian government by the Khmer Rouge. As Phnom Pen falls to the insurgents, all of the expatriates are deported, forcing the group to leave behind their translator, Pran. He is subjected to the horrors of Pol Pot's "Year Zero," a policy of genocide that killed one fifth of the population of Cambodia, until he can escape in the confusion of the Cambodian-Vietnamese War.
The movie is filmed with a shocking and powerful authenticity. The actor who played the hero, Pran, Haing S. Ngor, actually was a refugee who had escaped the same tyrannical regime depicted in the film, and the portions of the movie focusing on his escape from the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea are harrowing. The scenes are almost all in Khmer, and without subtitles, the audience feels just as estranged and alone as Pran does.
It is not just important for students to learn about the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge. In the age of information, where the ability to communicate can topple governments and be an agent of change, it is the duty of all people who call themselves civilized to know at least something about the terrible things that go on in the parts of the world we choose to forget about.