During the spring, I bought The Killing Fields following a friend’s recommendation.

Just recently, I was able to sit down and watch the film, which – to say the least – is pretty powerful. Not exactly what I expected – less objective or documentary-style and more Hollywood, giving particular focus to the friendship of NYT reporter Sydney Schanberg and Cambodian interpreter Dith Pran, all within the context of the bloody historical event.

Despite the focused personal touch, there is a great section that takes viewers into what it was like to have lived through the Khmer Rouge and, moreover, Pol Pot’s “Year Zero” ethnic cleansing campaign (which killed over two million human beings). In a letter to Schanberg, Pran writes:

Sydney, I think of you often, and of my family. They tell us that God is dead and now the party they call the Angka will provide everything for us. He says, Angka has identified and proclaims the existence of a bad new disease – a memory sickness – diagnosed as thinking too much about life in pre-Revolutionary Cambodia. He says, we are surrounded by enemies. The enemy is inside us. No one can be trusted. We must be like the ox and have no thought except for the party. No love, but for the Angka. People starve, but we must not grow food. We must honor the comrade children whose minds are not corrupted by the past.

Sydney, Angka says that those who were guilty of soft living in the years of the great struggle and did not care for the sufferings of the peasant must confess because now is the year zero and everything is to start anew. I’m full of fear, Sydney. I must show no understanding, not of French or English. I must have no past, Sydney. This is the year zero, and nothing has gone before.

The wind whispers of fear and hate. The war has killed love, Sydney. And those who confess to the Angka vanish, and no one dares ask where they go. Here, only the silent survive.

To think, this really happened…

Check out the film’s trailer below.