Perpetrator Cinema: Confronting Genocide in Cambodian Documentary

Perpetrator Cinema: Confronting Genocide in Cambodian Documentary explores a new stage in the cinematic depiction of genocide that has emerged in Cambodian documentary in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries. While past films documenting the Holocaust and other genocides have focused on collecting and foregrounding the testimony of survivors and victims, post-Khmer Rouge Cambodian documentarians propose a direct confrontation between the first-generation survivor and the perpetrator of genocide. The films break with Western tradition and disrupt the political view that reconciliation is the only legitimate response to the atrocious past. Morag’s analysis reveals how perpetrator cinema is capable of providing this era’s new epistemic tools and propelling the recent social-cultural-psychological shift from the era of the witness to the era of the perpetrator.

Morag, Raya. Perpetrator Cinema: Confronting Genocide in Cambodian Documentary. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020.