B

Rithy Panh draws a quietly devastating picture of the Killing Fields, the horrors that followed the communist takeover of Cambodia, by recreating the atmosphere of the notorious detention center of Tuol Sleng, codename S21, located in suburban Phnom Penh. The complex of buildings–an abandoned school–is now a museum commemorating the 17,000 prisoners executed there over the period from 1975 to 1979. For Panh, who was eleven when his own family was killed and who was himself sent to a labor camp, making the film was clearly a personal journey of discovery, a sort of cinematic archaeological expedition, and he succeeds in conveying his horrified fascination with trying to understand the inhumanity of Khmer policy to his viewers.

After offering a brief sketch of Pol Pot’s takeover of the country using newsreel footage, “S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine” seeks to comprehend, at least to some degree, the enormity of his genocidal policies by bringing back to the infamous site two of its survivors–most notably Vann Nath, who escaped death by painting portraits of Khmer Rouge officers–and a group of former guards, interrogators and other camp personnel, who take us through their former routines in the now-empty rooms and whom the soft-spoken yet insistent Nath questions about their actions. Making use of the voluminous records and photos left behind by the now-defunct regime (in this respect it almost matched the fastidiousness of the Nazi machine), the documentary makes abundantly clear the incredible brutality of a government whose leaders have largely escaped punishment and the rationalizations of those who were, however reluctantly, its instruments. Nath in effect acts as the audience’s surrogate: in probing the past, he too is obviously attempting to understand how it could have happened, while coming to terms with his own survival in the midst of so much death and cruelty. One can see in him the same sort of residual pain, and even guilt, that so many survivors of the Holocaust express.

“S21” moves very slowly and tends to be repetitive, but it has a simmering intensity beneath its deceptively placid surface, and by the close the haunting, hypnotic mood it creates has had a powerful impact.