In the middle of life, childhood returns.
The water is sweet and bitter.
I seek my childhood like a lost picture,
or rather, it seeks me.
Is it because I am 50,
because I've seen troubled times when fear alternates with hope?
The memory is there, now,
pounding at my temples, I'd like to get rid of it.
With clay and with water, with the dead, with rice fields,
with living hands, a man is made.
It doesn’t take much, it just takes will.
His suit is white, his tie is dark
I want to hold him close: He is my father.
I remember the old days in Phnom Penh, the great gatherings at our house,
I remember laughter and singing,
the smell of caramel, fish, spices, and mango.
We danced, we chattered with aunts and uncles.
Cousins brought fruit - guavas and jackfruit.
It was a time for studies and books.
I loved to hear my father read us poetry at night.
I remember how sweet life was.
Then came the war.
The bombings were nearer in the 1970s.
I remember the first who had died, our fear, my sorrow as a child.
So many pictures that go by again and again in a row.
We think we owned them because we've seen them.
When we discover a picture on a screen
that is neither painting, nor shroud…
…then it is not missing.
Phnom Penh was surrounded by the Khmer Rouge,
who'd come to end injustice and exploitation.
They entered the capital on April 17th, 1975.
There were no cries of joy only silent expectancy.
I was there.
I remember the look in the eyes of the young soldiers: As if we had not been there.
They had their orders: Never touch the enemy by the hand.
The enemy, that's me. I am 13.
The central bank blows up with all its money.
There's no turning back.
The city is impure, the city is corrupt.
It is emptied within hours.
2 million people are thrown onto the roads;
they leave behind their homes, their loved ones, their memories…
…in fact: the former world.
Long live the glorious April 17th, a day overflowing with joy!
The revolution is pure, it wants nothing of people.
Now, Phnom Penh can be filmed
like in the prophecy of Puth Tomniey:
Houses with no occupants, streets with no pedestrians,
stairs that no one will climb,
flowing rivers of blood.
Very soon we were separated.
We headed into the country in the middle of dry season.
We are hungry and thirsty.
We go from hand to hand
like animals in cattle cars, then wagons.
Phnom Penh's deportation is a missing picture.
Immediately, the Khmer Rouge counted,
then separated women and men, adults and children.
Souvernirs were forbidden.
Suddenly, there are no individuals, only numbers.
Then they cut our hair,
they take our watches, glasses, toys, books.
They die our clothes black, they change our first names.
We are the New People:
bourgeois, intellectuals, and capitalists, to be re-educated, to be destroyed.
You must embrace the proletarian condition!
This is the new land that we call Democratic Kampuchea.
A factory with smoke most unsettling:
Concrete dikes and rice fields,
no people.
All of society is organized collectively and militarily
in working units.
The Angkar takes care of you all, comrades!
Brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers...
The Angkar is the organization, it is all. It is each:
it is the young Khmer Rouge, the village chief,
the head of the torture center, and Pol Pot.
They must be watched, these barefoot people of the sand, and dust.
Soon there will be no more faces, no more friends, no more love…
no more father and mother, soon there will be no more emotion,
and even words will be transformed.
Each being will be a revolutionary - or fertilizer for the rice fields.
To hang on, you must hide within yourself a strength, a memory,
an idea that nobody can take from you.
For a picture can be stolen, a thought cannot.
The Angkar requests that you attend
a study session to reconstruct yourself.
Comrades, soon we will be masters of the water, of the earth and the elements.
Every hectare will yield 3 tons of rice, or 5, or 7.
Then we will be 10 million.
There will be no more hunger, no more fatigue, no more injustice.
The elderly will be fed by machines.
The Angkar is perceptive and full of solutions.
The people are the brain of the Angkar.
Long live the extraordinary grandiose Kampuchean revolution!
Long life to a new society devoid of rich and poor!
We raise our fists, we repeat the slogans.
The Angkar will establish a model society, unique in the world, without class division.
In this perfect world, the dams are made of concrete,
these embankments are paved. Everything is in order.
At the top of this utopia, there’s a red flag,
and of course, this truth:
Comrades you are so very free!
For now, you must obey, dig ceaselessly,
move earth, move rock.
For months, I dug a pond on arid plains.
I never saw water. Not once.
Long live Democratic Kampuchea! A prodigious leap forward,
a marvellous leap forward, an extraordinary, grandiose leap forward!
Be determined to work in the rice fields! Don't count on the heavens!
These slogans have not left me, I sometimes hear them still.
Former society thought only of feasting.
Collectivism is the fertilizer and the fodder.
From now on, a saucepan is individualistic.
It is forbidden to possess one.
So we share everything.
Our only belonging is our spoon.
With hunger you get a man.
You get them all, living or dead.
As for the sick, or those who do not obey -
they are not fed, or only get half-rations.
Hunger, it's for us.
Hunger, it’s a weapon. The new people are a parasitic plant!
The ancient people, who watch us, live in the granaries.
They are never hungry.
To re-educate is first to destroy.
In Phnom Penh, there is a people to wipe out.
"Conquest through emptiness" is a picture glaring with simplicity.
The Khmer Rouge want a man made of metal, a pure instrument of revolution.
Khmer Rouge leaders are the universal and homogeneous state.
They never look at each other.
There is of course Pol Pot, Brother Number One, whom we recognize by his fan.
And then his comrades, Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, Khieu Samphan, and Son Sen.
Rise, you damned of the earth!
The damned, that's us: We in the fields, in chains,
wandering like ghosts.
In this capital, 4 years empty, there remains the Central Committee,
and Ponhea Yat high school, which becomes center S-21.
Here, they whip, electrocute,
they cut, they force-feed excrements, they get confessions.
It all starts with purity and ends with hate.
I know the Khmer Rouge photographs executions.
Why? For proof, to complete a report?
What man having photographed this scene would not want it to go missing?
I look for this picture.
If at last I should find it, I could not show it, of course.
And anyway, what would a picture of a dead man reveal?
I prefer this anonymous young woman
who defies the camera, and the eye of her torturer,
and still looks straight at us.
Scarlet blood that covers Kampuchean cities and plains - our fatherland,
sublime blood of workers and peasants,
sublime blood of men and of women, of revolutionary fighters,
Blood turned to implacable hatred and resolved fighting,
you freed us from slavery.
Yet, one does not film with impunity.
I look at these child laborers, their hands, their faces, their weary bodies.
This young avanguard works toward its own destruction.
At night, I told stories from before,
of ghosts, of witches, of lost travelers, and mischievous children.
So they put me in the kitchen, where we ate well.
I told the story of the Apollo rocket, racing for the moon
to these revolutionaries who spoke in numbers and codes.
Scarlet blood that covers the cities and plains, do you cover the moon, too?
I dreamt of walking on it, like Neil Armstrong, lightfooted and childlike.
One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.
"But who are these people?", asked a comrade.
"These people who walk on the moon, they are Americans. I saw the pictures back then."
"Americans? You're lying, that’s impossible."
The storyteller confesses, the storyteller is killed.
The great leap for mankind is not to be found in capitalist propaganda.
It is here, for we who are hungry.
Long live the independent masterful way
of Democratric Kampuchea's revolutionary Angkar!
Long live its extraordinary clearvoyance!
On our moon there’s nothing, parched earth and dust bury it all.
It took me years to learn to walk upon it, bare feet on thorns.
Muddy water trickles down my throat.
Little by little, I disappear, I'm nothing anymore.
It is strange to drink mud.
The buffalo watch us: "How odd these humans are to drink our water!"
A Nestlé tin becomes our unit of measure.
It contains 250 grams of rice.
Very soon, famine strikes: These 250 grams, we share them daily.
7 of us, then 16, then 25. We share hunger.
My mother fights for us:
She builds a shack of branches, leaves and vines.
Each day she walks two hours so we may drink clean water.
She gets permission to take my father a half-ration.
But one night he tells us:
"I will no longer eat animal food. No. I am a man."
And he stops eating.
I don't understand, I resent him.
They found some sheet metal
to carry his body to the pit grave.
My mother doesn't cry, not a tear before the Khmers Rouge.
That night, she tells me how my father should have been buried: by his own,
by his good teacher friends, traditionally and peacefully.
This "funeral in words" I don't want to forget: it was an act of resistance.
My father came from a poor family, he believed in schools.
He dreamt of sending his sisters and brothers, his children, and ancestors.
So we should be a free people.
He didn't abandon us, he was teaching us free will.
I still feel his soul returned to our home.
Where he can at last recite in peace his favorite poem, by Prévert:
"Black hair, black hair, Caressed by waves,
Black hair, black hair, Tousled by winds."
Here, schools become extermination centers.
Here, pigs become readers since readers were pigs.
Here, every soldier has a pen in his pocket,
sometimes a watch on his wrist.
For us, it is forbidden, but it is a sign, a distinction
in a land that hates knowledge.
The spade is you pen!
The rice field is your paper!
Here is the "school of applied electricity" intended to train technicians.
These students of this school must be children of poor peasants,
or the lower middle class,
or fighters, girls and boys from the revolutionary army.
Comrade Trang is 16 years old.
At 9, he joined the revolution and the revolutionary army.
He fought on many battlefields.
He was also wounded.
There are many children like comrade Trang at the front and behind it,
they are countless.
They all have exceptional biographies.
Today, they work hard with all their might and heart
within their units to defend and rebuild the country.
I spent my own childhood in film studios with a director neighbor.
I loved the wonderful world of wigs and costumes, colors and gold.
The land of giants and fairy tales.
I loved it backstage, where beautiful actresses seemed to dance just for me.
I collected scraps of film
that I watched using a box and a small light.
Then that world was destroyed. The cinemas were closed, the artists were executed,
the singers, technicians, and the directors were sent to fields.
A Khmer Rouge film is always a slogan:
Practice is worth all theories, so don’t entertain personal ideas!
He who has the disease of former society, let him take Lenin for a pill!
From now on, there is but one actor: It is not the people, but Pol Pot.
He is the revolution, his myth must be forged.
A hut is built in the jungle, a wooden set,
Pol Pot is a revolutionary, he drinks only tea,
uses an oil lamp, washes outdoors,
lives with his country, his books, his gun, his comrades.
He lives the ideology.
Brother Number One was inspired by young humanity,
the original people: the Jarai,
the Cuoi, the Bunong.
A sparse handful of families who shared everything in common.
By observing them he understood, like Rousseau’s noble savage.
Already in Paris, Pol Pot signed his articles «Original Khmer».
The Khmer Rouge, it's Marx and Rousseau:
Integral communism and the pure, original world.
A perfect society.
The radiant revolution shines with all its glory!
These peasants, scrawned, abandoned, adhere to the fight for justice.
They look good on the new country's banknotes,
which will never be used.
There is no more selling, no more trade,
no more complaints, no more theft, no more pillaging,
no more private property, there are no more problems.
The new people are re-educated in the rice fields, plunged into the original world,
that they be purified.
They must be forged, returned to ancient ways, or be destroyed.
Pol Pot says: "Those whom we cannot re-educate, we will fight like enemies."
The Angkar never uses any object from imperialist or feudal society.
Capitalist's automobiles confess their crimes; they, too, are re-educated.
These cars work toward edifying the new country.
Evenings, after the work site, off for indoctrination.
Words change meaning, we speak in slogans.
The comrade with many faults is the enemy.
Whoever protests is an enemy. Whoever opposes is a corpse.
A 9 year old boy denounces his mother for picking mangoes.
A child shouts: "The comrade recognized her crime!"
His mother weeps softly.
To confess is to accept to die for the revolution to be just.
When humans will be free and equal to this degree, will they still be humans?
The mother closes her eyes.
Is it to picture her child?
She says nothing.
Then, she's taken into the forest by guards, never to return.
I want to escape the mud, my hunger, my black clothes.
Walking in water is torture. I collapse from exhaustion.
Sometimes, an airplane crosses the sky.
Is it observing us?
Will it parachute a camera to me, so the whole world will know at last?
The missing picture: That's us.
This unreal airplane saves me.
I have no more name, no more family, no more hope.
But I still have a human heart.
I think of the old days, of my brother who disappeared in Phnom Penh
on April 17th, 1975,
with his guitar. The Khmer Rouge must not have liked him,
not his smile, nor his teenage bangs, not his songs.
Color has vanished. Like laughter, song, and dance.
Our day-to-day life is a combat,
a war against nature, against words, against the enemy.
The children sent to the front are small,
but full of energy to fulfill their duty.
And me, I kept repeating: "The Angkar never makes mistakes, the Angkar is everything".
I don't wish anyone to see a child dying:
Feet swollen, face swollen, as if all that was left was water.
The little girl is shaking of hunger. So she steals corn.
The group leader catches her and brings her back to us. It is a crime.
The grandmother forbids her to eat the corn: "We don't steal. We are proud."
The little girl cries and me, I don't get it.
During the night, the child chews salt.
Her teeth crunch. Hunger strikes at night.
She sleeps next to me. Her belly's swollen, her expression blank. She sighs.
She calls her mother, she calls her father, then she calls no more
and we buried her.
The two other children died soon afterward.
I wish to be rid of this picture of hunger and suffering,
so I show it to you.
The mother is transported to the hospital.
There, she learns that her 16-year-old daughter has died.
Here, everyone dies.
Without a word, she strokes her forehead,
she picks the lice off the beautiful, gaunt face,
and she, too, lies down on the wooden planks.
Fishing is forbidden yet fish are down by the hundreds.
In hiding, I catch one.
Two days later, I take it to my mother.
But she's already dead.
So, I understood I would be alone.
I picture our house again, our kitchen, the garden,
the notebooks, my parents' faces.
These pictures are not missing, they are inside me.
We are determined to fulfill our 1977 political duty
with an extraordinary grand leap forward.
I have become one of these children at the work sites.
Looking closely at this movement, one sees the fatigue, the falls,
the gaunt faces. One sees the cruelty.
One sees that some can no longer work,
yet there is a camera.
Here is the teacher, that's what we call her.
She teaches us the spade and shovel, and ideology.
Let us live in perfect equality!
It's the children's revolt.
Of course, each must count on no one else!
But Khmer Rouge cadres eat better than us.
They never go hungry. Where is the equality?
So our leaders do their self-criticism.
My friends and I are sent to a very tough camp the very next day.
At this work site, we must dig 3 m³ of dirt in the morning,
and make 25 to 30 kilos of fertilizer in the afternoon,
from leaves and cow manure.
There were so few cows, trees and leaves
that these quotas are unattainable.
If we don't manage to extract these 3 m³,
they are raised to 5 m³.
Work eagerly, don’t be defeatist before the enemy!
You must love and respect the collectivity!
This camp was a tomb guarded by a man in a felt hat.
His dog watched us curiously.
This man beat those who didn't obey his rules.
We were forbidden to dig for roots to eat, and forbidden to speak.
He was eating alone and had his own food. So did his dog.
We share our children's rations.
In Paris, or elsewhere, those who loved our slogans
those who read books, have they seen these pictures?
Or were they missing?
I return to the past, to all those who died,
my sisters, my brothers, my cousins, my parents.
Childhood is both far and near,
with its gentleness, its joyful cries, its laughter, and voices.
Childhood is a refrain.
I haven't been home since April 17th, 1975.
Yet, I remember every detail:
The paintings, the doors, the jugs, the hallways...
My house became a gambling dive, a karaoke club, then a brothel.
It, too, was voided, torn from its history.
There is no truth, there is only cinema.
The revolution is cinema.
I remember the great flood in 1978.
I was already at a labor camp, and we were so hungry.
Then a huge bale of rice straw washed up on the river bank.
We even found eggs! So we ate.
With film, too, the harvest is glorious.
There is grain, there are these calm, determined faces.
Like in a painting, a poem.
At last, I see the revolution they so promised us.
It exists only on film.
These sacks of rice were not for us.
Were they reserved for our leaders?
Or shipped abroad, since they are marked in Arabic numerals?
Or were they film props, full of sand?
Our every move was scrutinized,
our every breath, and even our silence,
but the great famine escaped Khmer Rouge leaders.
They did not know, they did not see? Could they not act?
Does the truth lie in the slogans, so glorious,
or in these pictures that are not missing?
This is what Pol Pot has to say:
"Currently our cooperatives are well-established units,
politically and in spirit,
capable of accomplishing all of the Angkar's directives.
Throughout the land
they have fulfilled their revolutionary duties well,
they have transformed our sad, dry regions of former times
poor, and without drinking water.
Now, there are ponds great and small,
and nice interconnecting green
rice fields and orchards.
These cooperatives are founding a new society
purged of corruption and rogues of all sorts.
These cooperatives are founding a new society,
collectivist, uncorrupt, equal, and prosperous.
These cooperatives live a perfect existence
in terms of food, health, sanitation,
culture, studies, and education.
The reality is this:
Straw huts, drought, exhaustion, hunger,
neon lights to work by night,
speakers blaring slogans.
Ideology was rampant in the fields.
The one who shot this footage, slow and true, was named Ang Sarun.
He was a Khmer Rouge cameraman.
To him, we also owe this footage of a speech by Pol Pot.
Why this haze? Is it a technical glitch?
Or did he mean to show the children in rags,
to show Brother Number One the true state of the nation?
The cameraman is tortured, then executed.
His body disappears, his story disappears.
But not his footage.
Let us commit to brandishing ever higher
the red standard of the revolution!
It sounds like Mao, but it's an Angkar slogan.
Pol Pot goes to the airport in person to greet Zhang Chunqiao of the Gang of Four,
and Geng Biao.
Chinese comrades inspired the policies
and ideology of Democratic Kampuchea.
This picture of fraternity is not missing.
The great leap forward, is it not wonderful?
Is not each day a celebration?
Is not Kampuchea succeeding
through purity, through a void, where the Chinese Revolution failed?
Is not Kampuchea an extraordinary laboratory of ideology?
Is not this visit a lesson?
We hunted rats, we ate them.
We ate insects, roots, and raw snails.
That's how dehumanization starts:
With hunger, with disease, with physical decay.
Who filmed the sick people?
Who filmed the pagodas turned hospices,
the maggot-eaten knee of my bunk neighbor?
Or the young woman who can't deliver,
who screams all night, alone, hitting her belly, to death?
Of course, there is a Khmer Rouge Hospital.
I lived there for weeks, in the huge halls of death.
Medicines are stored in Coca-Cola bottles,
Patients are injected with coconut water - so pure.
I wish I could not hear the moaning, the hiccups, the screaming,
no longer smell the damp, rotting flesh.
The dead go at night.
Mornings, I'd carry them away on wood planks. And I survived.
This man sitting on the floor is too weak:
He does not eat, he cannot move.
I've pictured him all these years. I hold out a hand to him.
The Khmer Rouge have banned capitalist medicine.
They chop roots, they boil them.
They experiment with traditional remedies, and therefore revolutionary.
Everywhere are experimental units using humans. At S-21, for example.
There are not more diplomas, there are only "practical" diplomas.
I washed the halls, I washed the sick.
And every morning, I carried the dead down to the pit.
Sometimes I titter at the edge of the void,
there are hollow sounds, bones knocking, hands that seek,
and find, those of a child.
This child, who says he's alive and who tells the tale - that's me.
In the middle of life, childhood returns,
sweet and bitter, with its pictures.
Childhood as drowning, childhood as a question: How is it that I am here?
Why couldn't I have helped my loved ones more?
Already in childhood, death is present.
We understand the Khmers Rouge by watching their footage.
Pol Pol forges a reality conformant with his desire.
Even nature must conform.
Sometimes, the cadres gathered several villages
and showed a film
boasting of bare handed fight against the colonial powers.
Of course, we knew that the actors were bad, that the film was bad,
and many of us slept in the back, exhausted - like me.
For 4 years, we've been moved from work site to work site.
How do you revolt when all you've got are black clothes and a spoon?
When you are lost, when you are hungry?
Some say now that it's because of Buddhism and the acceptance of destiny.
Where were those fine minds then? In their books? In their lofty ideas?
Here, it is not karma, not religion that kills. It's ideology.
At the start of all totalitarism is falsity.
You're afraid of your enemies, you're afraid of tree trunks.
I worked in the great forests.
We had to cut trees to plant corn crops.
There was the heat, the humidity,
the snakes, the tarantulas, the monkeys,
and the lizards that some of my comrades ate.
Don't let yourselves be vanquished by nature!
Vow to attack, make a breach!
These slogans never roused me,
but the sounds of the great forest did.
We hardened, growing used to fighting the cold, to controlling our bodies.
After the storm, we slept in wet clothes.
I remember the central market,
its tart, joyful smells, the scent of jasmine.
I remember lovers, their shy gestures, their glances.
I remember abundance.
I remember silk, fish, meat,
and the smell of boiled chicken that obsessed me for 4 years.
I remember happy meals.
At my childhood market, people had a mouth,
they laughed and talked. They kissed.
It’s the same street, lively, then empty.
Yes, the same, the neighborhoods of Phnom Penh,
if you only open your eyes.
I remember this world, so imperfect and human.
2000 years of slavery, said Pol Pot.
He’s a human being like you and me.
He simply made a choice, an ideological choice, be it a criminal one.
But it’s difficult.
That's why I really wanted to make this film.
No one is born an assassin, or an executioner.
Our son's turned jabbers now,
on and on he rumbles. At least he's good with words.
Would, brother, he'd be a teacher, like you.
But it's our story he's filming. That's us.
But there are the poor who are hungry, the rich expropriated them, too!
Yet, he thinks only of the Khmer Rouge!
The father is right.
Already before the Khmer Rouge, the poor were thrown off their land.
They enrolled the people because of this injustice.
And then, there were the Americans.
They dropped 500.000 tons of bombs on the country.
So the poor joined the revolution, they raised their fists.
The Khmer Rouge lied to them about justice,
about equality, about happiness, about progress. About everything.
And these same poor still dig dirt today.
Sometimes, I picture a child. Let's say it's me.
He had it all wrong.
He didn't know how to fish, to walk barefoot, or fight.
Years later, he feels guilty
for not having helped the destitute.
They say talking helps. You understand, you get over it.
For me, this wisdom will never come.
It's not a picture of loved ones I seek. I want to touch them.
Their voice is missing so I won't tell.
I want to leave it all, leave my language, my country - in vain.
And my childhood returns.
Now, it's the boy who seeks me out.
I see him, he wants to speak to me.
But words are hard to find.
This black dog is the God of Passage.
He takes me to its boat.
Whe I look at it, I see the man in the felt hat,
and the river floating corpses.
In the village where I lived,
some families stayed on after the Khmer Rouge left.
The young men went to work in Thailand.
The former village chief, who was cruel and terrified us on his horse,
was not arrested.
He lived happily, I believe, and had many children.
The Khmer Rouge canteen is gone.
Hardly anything remains:
a few shards of jugs, rusty pans, a clay oven...
It's all over, like a cruel film.
As for the pit graves near the hospital, where I buried so many,
and my mother, and my sisters… The pits have become a man-made lake,
dug out by an international organization.
The bones have been carried away,
pumpkins and corn have been planted.
But the lake is so salty, and such an odd green,
that no one dares use it, or drink from it.
Are the dead there? Yes.
Sometimes it seems we walk over them, so I step away.
There are always souls who wander, seeking a place, a sweet, noble thought.
Many resisted, many.
In silence, in a word, in a smile.
Sometimes, a small gesture is all it takes to say "no".
I think of my father who announced his choice.
Sometimes, silence is a scream.
Mourning is difficult, there is no end to the burial.
There are no more cattle cars.
There are no more slogans, no more young guards in black.
There is the blood-trenched earth.
Their flesh is mine,
so we are together.
There are many things that man should not see or know.
Should he see them, he'd be better of dying.
But should any of us see or know these things,
then he must live to tell of them.
Every morning I worked over that pit,
my shovel hit bones and heads.
As for dirt, there is never enough.
It's mee they will kill. Or maybe they already have.
Of course I haven't found the missing picture,
I looked for it, in vain.
A political film should unearth what it invented.
And so, I make this picture, I look at it, I cherish it
I hold it in my hand like a beloved face.
This missing picture, I now hand over to you
so that it never ceases to seek us out.