Meeting with Pol Pot

At the age of fifteen Rithy Panh managed to escape the Cambodian genocide, but the entire rest of his family—his parents, sisters, and nephews—were murdered. He made his way to Paris, where he got interested in movies, and eventually graduated from film school there. His career as a director has been devoted almost exclusively to examining that terrible period when the Khmer Rouge conducted mass executions of anyone labeled as bourgeois or intellectual. Combined with the exhaustion, starvation and lack of medical care in the camps, the result was roughly a quarter of the population, over 2 million people, dying…