North Americans tend to overlook the reality that our continent was built upon two pillars: slavery and genocide. When documentary films address the subject of genocide, they tend to focus on the event itself as opposed to its aftermath—the healing (if any) that occurs within the collective psyche of the nation and the individuals who participated in it. S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine is a startling healing principle (there’s no other way to describe it) that sets out not only to reclaim the histories portrayed within it but also to help the individuals who participated in those histories to heal.
In the early 1970s, a coup against the ruling aristocracy occurred in Cambodia; a group known as the Khmer Rouge swept into power and established a brutal regime that banned religions, closed schools, abolished the currency, carried out a systematic genocide of more than two million innocent people. These crimes against humanity occurred at a nondescript government building—Building S21—in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh.
Director Rithy Panh returns two survivors of the death camp (a painter and a mechanic) to meet with 10 former interrogators and guards to discuss what happened and to recreate the daily procedural events that occurred within the death walls of Building S21. The memories of both oppressor and oppressed remain vivid.
Needless to say, this is startling, horrific, but necessary cinema. Panh makes extensive use of long, floating takes, his camera panning back and forth between guard and prisoner as they discuss what happened, why it happened, and who (if anyone) is responsible. Scenes of guards recreating their nightly watches, rousing prisoners, choosing who will die and when, take on an indescribable sadness within the now-empty confines of a building littered with the photographs, “confessions,” and death certificates of the victims.
By designing this film as a healing confessional, Panh brings strict aesthetic clarity in the movement and meaning of his images. He focuses on physical details—specific settings, specific actions—and uses extended takes with little or no extraneous editing. As a result, he and his subjects achieve an almost trancelike recreation of long-ago events, an experience that arguably contains the seeds of closure and release for the survivors, the guards, and the Cambodian nation.
The film’s finale takes us outside the camp to the site where the bodies were buried. A guard breaks down as he describes in detail the final stages of the killing machine. A wind blows through the now-deserted building. In memory.

Watch S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine online at www.video.google.ca .