Click here to buy the Home Video version of S21 on DVD

"Memory is fragile, you have to try to be as precise as possible. All we knew is that we needed a team of Cambodians that could speak and understand the war language of the Khmer Rouge, and who had lived the same history." - Filmmaker Rithy Panh

The Cambodian genocide of 1975-1979, in which approximately 1.7 million people lost their lives (21% of the country's population), was one of the worst human tragedies of the last century. The Khmer Rouge, headed by Pol Pot, combined extremist ideology, ethnic animosity, and a disregard for human life to produce murder on a massive scale.

As hundreds of thousands of people slowly starved in the rice fields, a select number met their fate inside Khmer Rouge interrogation centers. The most famous of these centers, codenamed S-21, was located in the abandoned suburban Phnom Penh high school of Tuol Sleng ("hill of the poison tree"). To the Tuol Sleng neighborhood, S-21 was known simply as konlaenh choul min dael chenh - "the place where people go in but never come out."

Over 17,000 prisoners were interrogated, tortured, and executed there - only a handful survived. For S21: THE KHMER ROUGE KILLING MACHINE, two survivors and a dozen former Khmer Rouge fighters - prison guards, interrogators, a doctor and a photographer - return to the site, which now houses a genocide museum, to excavate the past.

The singularity of the film lies in a confrontation between the survivors, who want to understand what happened so they can warn future generations, and the jailers, who seem stupefied as they re-live the horror to which they contributed.

Poeuv, a prison guard, started at S21 when he was 12. He describes his daily task of preventing the prisoners, driven mad by their suffering, from breaking free of their handcuffs and jumping out the window. He and the other former guards sit, wearing embarrassed smiles, trying to explain why they did what they did. They evoke the slogans ("the sublime blood of workers and peasants" and "pulling out the weed at the root"), and recall the murder of entire families.

When Cambodian-born filmmaker Rithy Panh was 11, his sisters and parents were murdered by the regime, and he was sent out to a labor camp. In 1979, he made it to France and managed to win entry to IDHEC (the leading French film school). "I wasn't born in the cinema world, but I had to find a way to tell this story."

Although holding the Khmer Rouge accountable is important, where does one draw the line? Panh says he would like to see the highest-ranking Khmer Rouge leaders, who are still alive, put on trial. But he knows that, ultimately, a tribunal won't solve anything, it won't bring his parents back to life.

What is more urgent is to help Cambodians work on their personal memories. He hopes his films will be a stimulus for just that, "It is a question of who we are, where we come from, how we explain ourselves to our children." And it is important not just for Cambodians, but for all of us.

"Rithy Panh revisits the most extreme Communist regime to ever decimate a society. Filled with reproachful ghosts, his personal doc draws on the testimony of victims and perpetrators, as well as the bureaucratic records. The movie is unforgettable; in its modest way, it's as horrific an exposure to evil as 'Shoah.'"—J. Hoberman, The Village Voice

"Imaginative and disorienting... Panh's film excavates new levels of horror, capturing the grueling tension that existed between jailer and jailed. Through its force and honesty, Panh's documentary may help the healing begin."—MSNBC Online

"An affecting and effective film."—Elvis Mitchell, The New York Times

"Highly Recommended. Panh illuminates what Cambodia is going through in its attempts to come to terms with its past and to build a just future. Although this film can be painful to watch, it should be of value to those interested in political science, genocide, modern Southeast Asian history, and human rights. An excellent discussion tool."—Educational Media Reviews Online

"Recommended. Filmmaker Rithy Pahn draws a quietly devastating portrait of the horrors that followed the communist takeover of Camdodia... Making use of the voluminous records and photos left behind by the regime, the documentary makes abundantly clear the incredible [government] brutality...and the rationalizations of those who were its instruments. S21 boasts a simmering intensity beneath its deceptively placid surface."—Video Librarian