Big Perpetrator Cambodian cinema, the documentary duel and moral resentment

During the last decade, under the auspices of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia for the Prosecution of Crimes Committed during the Period of Democratic Kampuchea’ workings, the New Cambodian (documentary) Cinema, as a docu-activist cinema, has taken upon itself both the search for the Big (high-ranking) Khmer Rouge perpetrators and the establishment of Amérian-inspired relation to its past. Challenging the post-traumatic conventions set during the era of the witness, the films dealing with high-ranking perpetrators (e.g., Roshane Saidnattar’s Survive: in the Heart of Khmer Rouge Madness [2009], Thet Sambath and Rob Lemkin’s Enemies of the People: A Personal Journey into the Heart of the Killing Fields [2009], and Rithy Panh’s Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell [2011]), constitute two exceptional phenomena, rare in world cinema: an encounter performed as a duel between the survivor and perpetrator in an effort to get the perpetrator to acknowledge the truth and transform the power relation; and, consequently, through this encounter, an inclination towards moral resentment, which, in contrast to the ‘truth and reconciliation’ model of forgiveness, demands that the perpetrator be held to account. I suggest that it is in relation to the process or phenomenon of autogenocide that the New Cambodian Cinema’s survivor-perpetrator duel documentaries assist us in deciphering the hidden ‘logics’ of genocides. Moreover, this cinema paves the way for spectators to discover a new ethics, emanating from the political-social-psychological and cultural situation in identity-torn Cambodia in the post-autogenocide age, moving Cambodia towards a culture of accountability.

Raya Morag, Big Perpetrator Cambodian cinema, the documentary duel and moral resentment, Screen, Volume 62, Issue 1, Spring 2021, Pages 37–58, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjab003