"In the midst of life, childhood comes back to mind" "It's like sweet and bitter water." "I seek my childhood like a lost picture" "To be more precised it is my childhood which demands me" "Is it because I'm 50 years old or because I knew turbulent times during which fear and hope were alternating?" "Memories are here, now" "They bang my temples, I would like to drive them away" "With soil and water, with the dead and rice fields with living hands, we can build a man" "It doesn't take much, you just have to believe in it" "His suit is white, his tie is dark" "I would like to hold him against me:" "He's my father" "I remember the old days in Phnom Penh, the big parties in our house" "I remember laughter and songs" "There were smells of caramel, of fishes, of spices, of mango" "We used to dance, to speak endlessly with our uncles and aunts" "My cousins used to bring fruits - guava and jackfruit" "At this time, we studied, we read books" "In evenings, I enjoyed listening to my father reciting poetry" "I especially remember the sweetness of things" "Then the war came" "Bombing came closer in the 70s" "I remember the first casualties, our fear, my child's sadness" "There are so many images in the world which play on a loop" "We think we have assimilated them because we saw them" "When we discover a frame on a screen which is not a board or a shroud the image is not missing." "Phnom Penh was surrounded by the Khmer Rouge who came to stop injustice and exploitation" "They entered the capital on April 17th, 1975" "People did not shout for joy but waited silently" "I was there" "I remember the look of these young fighters:" "they looked as if we had not been there" "An order has been given to them:" "never touch the enemy with your hands" "I am the enemy, I am 13 years old" "The central bank with its banknotes is blown" "There's no way back" "The city is impure, corrupted" "The city was emptied in a few hours 2 million people leave the city and abandon their house, their friends, their memories or to sum up: the old world" "Long live the very glorious April 17, a day of overflowing joy" "The revolution is so pure it doesn't want human beings" "Now Phnom Penh can be filmed as in Puth Tomniey's prophecy" "Houses will be without inhabitants, streets without passers-by" "Nobody will go up staircases" "Rivers of blood will pour" "Very soon we were separated" "We drove to the countryside in the dry season" "We were hungry and thirsty" "We were passed around as animals in cattle wagon and then we were transported by cart" "The deportation of Phnom Penh is a missing image" "At once the Khmer Rouge counted then separated women, men, adults and children" "Any keepsakes or personal effects are forbidden" "Suddenly there are no more individuals but just numbers" "Our hair is cut" "Watches, glasses, toys, books are seized" "Our clothes are dyed in black, our first names changed" "We are the New People:" "middle-class persons, intellectuals, capitalists to be re-educated or destroyed" "You have to embrace the proletarian condition" "Here is the new country called Democratic Kampuchea" "A factory with disturbing smokes" "Concrete dikes and rice fields" "No men" "The whole society is organized in a collective and military way in working units" "Comrades, Angkar is taking care of all of you" "Brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers" "Angkar is the organization made of everybody:" "the young Khmer Rouge, the village chief ...the head of the torture center or Pol Pot" "This people made of sand, of dust, these barefoot people must be monitored" "Soon there will be no more faces, no more friends, no more love..." "No more father, no more mother, soon there will be no more emotion" "Even words will be altered" "Everybody will be a fighter of the revolution or just some fertilizer for rice fields" "To resist, it is necessary to hide in oneself a strength, a memory an idea that nobody can take from you" "Because you can steal a image but not a thought" "Angkar invites you for a session of studies to rebuild yourself" "Comrades, we shall soon be masters of water, earth and elements" "Every hectare will produce 3 tons of rice or 5 or 7" "Then we will be 10 millions" "It will be the end of hunger, of injustice no more exhausted people" "Old men will be fed by a machine" "Angkar is clear-sighted and full of cleverness" "People are Angkar's brain" "Long live the grand and extraordinary Kampuchean revolution" "Long live the new society without rich nor poor people" "We raise our fist, we repeat slogans" "Angkar will establish a model society, quite unique, without class divide" "In this perfect world, dams are made of concrete and are covered with tar Everything is in order" "At the top of this utopia, there's a red flag and of course :" "Truth" "Comrades you are "very free"" "For now, you must obey, dig tirelessly move earth, move stones" "For months, I dug a pond in the middle of arid plains" "I never saw any water" "Long live the Democratic Kampuchea which made a quantum leap forward" "A great leap forward An extraordinary and grand leap forward" "Let's work with determination in the fields Things don't just come out of the blue" "These slogans have never left me, I think I still hear them" "My old society only thought about celebrating" "Collectivism is the fertilizer and the food" "Now a pan is individualistic" "It is prohibited to own one" "Then we share everything" "Our only good is our spoon" "With hunger we can control a man" "We control all of them, dead or alive" "The sick, those who do not obey are not fed or they have only a half-ration" "We are the only ones who experiment hunger" "To make people hungry, it's like a weapon the new people are a parasitic plant" "The people who watch us live in attics" "They are never hungry" "To re-educate starts with destroying" "All the inhabitants in Phnom Penh had to be erased" ""To conquer by destroying" is a perfect and simple metaphor" "The Khmer Rouge want a people made of iron who become a pure instrument of the revolution" "The Khmer Rouge leaders are the universal and homogeneous state" "They never look at each other" "There is of course Pol Pot, Brother Number One He's easily recognizable with his fan" "Pol Pot and his comrades, Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, Khieu Samphan, Son Sen" "Arise, wretched of the earth" "We are the wretched ones: we work in the fields, in chains we wander like ghosts" "In this empty capital for 4 years, there is only the Central Committee and the Ponhea Yat high school which becomes the S21 center" "Here people are whipped, electrocuted people's members are cut, people are eating feces, people admit" "Everything starts with a pure ideal and finishes with hatred" "I know that the Khmer Rouge took pictures of executions" "Why ?" "Did they need a proof, had a file to be completed?" "Which man who took pictures of this event would like that this picture is not missing?" "I'm looking for this picture" "If I finally found it, I could not show it, of course" "And what does a picture of death show?" "I prefer showing the picture of a young unknown woman who challenges the camera - the eye of the executioner - and still looks at us" "Scarlet blood which covers cities and plains of Kampuchea - our homeland..." "Sublime blood of workers, farmers" "Sublime blood of men and women fighting for freedom" "Blood which became implacable hatred and determined struggle" "You freed us from slavery" "Yet one cannot film with impunity" "I'm looking at these children with their hands, their faces and their body which are tired" "The work of this vanguard young people means their own destruction" "At night I used to tell old stories with ghosts, witches, lost travelers, mischievous children" "So they made me work in the kitchen where we eat well" "I told the story of the rocket Apollo rushing towards the moon ...to these revolutionaries who generally used figures and code to discuss" "Scarlet blood which covers cities and plain, will you also cover the moon ?" "I dreamed walking on it as Neil Armstrong with a light and childish step" "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" ""But who are these people?", a comrade asks" ""Those who walk on the moon are Americans, I saw the video once"" ""Americans?" "You are lying, it's impossible"" "The storyteller admits it, the storyteller is killed" "The giant leap for mankind is not in the capitalist propaganda" "It is for us who suffer from hunger" "Long live the independent and full of control vision of the revolutionary Angkar of Democratric Kampuchea" "Long live its extraordinary clear-sightedness" "On our moon there's nothing:" "this cracked and dusty earth buries all" "It took me years to learn how to walk barefoot over thorns" "Muddy water is flowing down my throat" "I'm disappearing little by little, I am nothing" "It's strange to drink mud" "The buffaloes are looking at us:" ""these men are strange, they drink our water"" "The Nestlé tin becomes our measurement unit" "It can contain 250g of rice" "Famine spread quickly:" "Every day we have to share these 250g" "It is divided into 7 parts, into 16, then into 25." "We share hunger." "My mother fights for us:" "She builds a hut with branches, leaves and vines" "Every day she walks two hours so that we can drink clear water" "She gets the right to give an extra half-ration to my father" "But one night he says to us:" ""I will stop eating food for animals." "I am a man."" "He stops eating" "I cannot understand, I resent him" "They found a steel sheet to carry his body up to the pit" "My mother does not cry, not a single tear for the Khmers Rouge" "That night, she told me how my father would have been buried by his relatives by his colleagues in respect of tradition and peace" "This "burial with words", I do not want to forget it: it was an act of resistance" "My father came from a poor family, he was believing in education" "He dreamed of sending to school his sisters and brothers, his children, his ancestors" "So that we can become a free people" "He did not abandon us:" "he taught us what freedom is" "I still have the feeling that his soul returned to our house" "Finally he can recite the Prévert's poem he loved so much" ""Black hair, black hair, Caressed by the waves" "Black hair, black hair, Tousled by the winds"" "Here, schools become centers of extermination" "Here, pigs are readers because readers were pigs" "Here, every soldier has a pen in his pocket" "Sometimes a watch on his wrist" "It is forbidden for us but it is a sign, a distinction in a country which hates knowledge" "The spade is you pen" "The rice field is your paper" "Here is the "school of electricity and real application" to train technicians" "These students are selected among children of poor farmers from low class or fighters from the revolutionary army" "The comrade Trang is 16 years old" "He entered the revolution and the revolutionary army at the age of 9" "He fought on several battlefields" "He was also wounded" "Children as Trang are plenty on the frontlines and in the rear" "We cannot count them" "They all had extraordinary lives" "Today they work with all their strength and all their heart within their unity to defend and reconstruct the country" "I spent my childhood in the movie studios with a neighbor who was a director" "I loved this wonderful world full of jewels and caps, of colors and gold" "The world of giants, of fairy tales" "I loved the backstage where beautiful actresses seemed to dance just for me" "I picked up small pieces of film" "I looked at them in boxes with a small light" "Then this world has been destroyed, the cinemas closed, the artists executed and the singers, the technicians, the directors sent to fields" "In a Khmer Rouge's movie there's always a slogan" "Practice worth any theories, so don't try to have any personal ideas" "To cure the disease of the old society, take Lenin as a medicine" "From now on only one actor remains:" "it is not the people, it is Pol Pot" "He embodies the revolution, it is necessary to create his myth" "A hut is built in the jungle - a wooden set " "Pol Pot is a revolutionary, He drinks only tea" "He uses an oil lamp, washes himself in the wild" "He lives like everybody in this country, with his books, his weapon, his comrades" "He inhabits the ideology" "Brother Number One was inspired by the young humanity" "The original population: the Jarai... the Cuoi, the Bunong" "Some families, here or there, who shared everything" "By observing them he understood." "He thought of Rousseau's good savage" "In Paris, Pol Pot already signed his articles : "Khmer of origin"" "The Khmer Rouge were inspired by Marx and Rousseau :" "the complete communist ideology and the pure world of the origins" "A perfect society" "The radiant revolution shines with all its brightness" "The frustrated and abandoned farmers join the struggle for justice" "They will look beautiful on the banknotes of the New Country" "But the banknotes will never be used" "There are no more sales, no more trade ...no more complaints, no more thefts, no more looting no more individual property, there are no more problems" "The new people are re-educated in rice fields, They are part of the world of the origins" "They can be pure again" "They need to be rebuilt or destroyed" "Pol Pot said: "those whom cannot re-educate, we shall fight them as if they were enemies"" "Angkar never uses anything from the imperialist or feudal society" "Capitalist cars recognized their crime and are re-educated too" "These cars work on the construction of a new country" "When we return from the construction site, it is time for indoctrination" "The words are altered, we only speak by using slogan" "The comrade who has a lot of defects is the enemy" "The one who protests is an enemy the one who opposes is a corpse" "A 9 year old child denounces his mother who picked mangoes" "The child shouts:" "" The comrade recognized her crime "" "His mother is gently weeping" "When you admit something, you agree to die for the righteousness of the revolution" "When men will be so free and equal, will they still be men ?" "The mother closes her eyes" "Is it to keep an image of her child?" "She keeps silent" "Then she left towards the forest with soldiers and never returned" "I would like to get away from the mud, from hunger, from my black clothes" "To walk in the water is a torture:" "I fall of exhaustion" "Sometimes a plane crosses the sky" "Is it watching us?" "Is it going to parachute me a camera so that the whole world knows our story?" "We are the missing picture" "This unreal aircraft saves me" "I have no more name, no more family, no more hope" "But I still have a human heart" "I remember the old days, my brother who disappeared in Phnom Penh" "April 17th, 1975" "His guitar must not have pleased the Khmer Rouge neither his look, nor his lock, nor his songs" "There are no more " colors " in laughter, dances and songs" "Our daily life became a fight  a war against nature, against words, against the enemy" "Children sent to the front line are still very young" "But they are full of energy to do their duty" "As for me, Ihave to repeat: "Angkar never makes any mistake, Angkar is everything"" "I wish no one to see a child dying" "With her swollen feet, her swollen face as if just water remains" "...the little girl is shaking all over because of hunger." "So she steals corn" "The group leader sees her and walks her to our home." "He says: " This is a crime "" "Her grandmother forbids her to eat corn:" "we are not thieves, we are proud people" "The little girl cries and I do not understand" "In the night the child eats salt" "His teeth grind We get hungry especially at night" "She slept beside me with her swollen belly and her fixed eyes." "She was sighing" "She called her mother, she called her father and then she kept silence" "And we buried her" "The other two children died also very quickly" "I don't want to see anymore this picture of hunger" "So I show it to you" "My mother is taken to the hospital" "She learns there that her 16-year-old daughter died" "Here, everybody dies" "Without saying a single word, she stroked her child's forehead" "She took off lice from her thin but still beautiful face" "Then she laid down on the wooden boards" "It is forbidden to fish yet fishes are plenty" "In secret I took one" "Two days later I brought it to my mother" "But she was already dead" "Then I understood that from now on I would be by myself" "I saw again our house, our kitchen, our garden my notebooks, the face of my parents" "These pictures are not missing, they are in my brain" "In 1977 we are determined to fulfill our political duty ...with an extraordinary leap forward" "I became one of those kids on construction sites" "If we look closely, we can see people fall down" "People are exhausted, their face is skinny We can see the cruelty of the scene" "Some of them cannot work anymore" "Yet there is a movie camera" "Here is the school teacher - as we call her" "She teaches us how to use a spade, a shovel She teaches us the ideology" "We are all equal" "This is the revolution of children" "Of course, everybody should only rely on himself" "But the Khmer Rouge leaders eat better than us" "They are never hungry Are we equal?" "The our own leaders make their self-criticism" "The very next day my friends and I are sent to a very hard camp" "On this site we had to dig 3 m3 of earth each morning and produce 25 to 30 kilos of fertilizer each afternoon ...from leaves and cow dungs" "There were so few cows, trees and leaves that these figures were impossible to reach" "If we could not manage to extract these 3 m3" "They became, by order, 5 m3" "Work hard, don't be defeatist anymore in front of the enemy" "You must love and respect the community" "This camp was a grave guarded by a man with a fedora" "His dog was staring at us as if we were a riddle" "This man beat those who did not respect the rules" "It was forbidden to dig to find roots and forbidden to speak" "He was eating alone and had his own food..." "like his dog" "We shared our child's rations" "In Paris or somewhere else, those who liked our slogans those who were reading books, did they see these images?" "Or were they missing ?" "I think about my past, about all those who disappeared my sisters, my brothers, my cousins, my parents" "Childhood is far and close with its sweetness, its joyful shouts, its laughter, its voices" "Childhood is always the same old story" "I have not come back home since April 17th, 1975" "Nevertheless I remember every detail:" "Paintings, doors, jars, passageways" "My home became a gambling house, a karaoke then a brothel" "It has also been emptied, deprived of its destiny" "There is no truth there are only movies" "Revolution is just playacting" "I remember the great flood in 1978" "I was already in a labor camp, we were so hungry" "Then a huge bunch of rice straw was put down by the river" "We even found eggs so we ate" "In movie theaters harvests are also glorious" "There are cereal grains, People look quiet and determined" "It looks like a painting, a poem" "At last I see the promised revolution" "It only exists in pictures" "These bags full of rice were not for us" "Were they reserved for the leaders ?" "Or sent abroad since they were all labeled in Arabic numerals?" "Or were they movie props, bags full of sand ?" "Our every move was scrutinized" "Our every breath and even our silence" "But the famine was not perceived by the Khmer Rouge leaders" "Did they know nothing, see nothing?" "Were they unable to do anything?" "Is truth in the glorious slogans..." "Or in these pictures which are not missing?" "Here is what Pol Pot said:" "" Currently our cooperatives are already solid units of collectivism politically and spiritually speaking able of achieving all the directives of Angkar" "In the countryside they successfully achieved all the revolutionary tasks" "They changed our dull and dry regions which were poor and without drinking water" "Now there are large and small basins canals which intersect lush rice fields and orchards" "These cooperatives are the foundation of a new society ...without corruption and thugs of all kinds" "These cooperatives are the foundation of a new society ...which is collectivist, uncorrupted, egalitarian, prosperous" "These cooperatives are healthy in all these fields: food, health, hygiene ...culture, education" "Here is the truth:" "Straw houses, drought, exhaustion, hunger neon lights for night work speakers howling slogans" "The ideology was in the fields and rice paddies..." "The man who captured these slow and true images is called Ang Sarun" "He was a Khmer Rouge cameraman" "He also shooted this speech of Pol Pot" "Why this fog ?" "Is it a technical error?" "Or does he want to show children in rags to show to Brother Number One the condition of his country?" "The cameraman is tortured and executed" "His body disappears, his story disappears" "But not this film" "Commit ourselves to always wave higher the red banner of the revolution" "It sounds like a sentence of Mao, it is a slogan of Angkar" "Pol Pot personally goes to the airport and hosts two major Chinese leaders" "Zhang Chunqiao and Geng Biao" "The Chinese Comrades inspired the politics and the ideology of Democratic Kampuchea" "This image of fraternity is not missing" "Is the great leap forward not wonderful?" "Is every day not a festive day ?" "Is Kampuchea not being successful owing to its purity while the Chinese Revolution failed ?" "Is Kampuchea not an extraordinary ideological laboratory?" "Is this visit not a lesson ?" "We chased rats, we ate them" "We ate insects, roots, raw snails" "Dehumanization starts in this way:" "with hunger, sickness, physical decay." "Who shooted the sick people?" "Who shooted pagodas changed into hospices?" "Who shooted the person sharing my room and his knee eaten by worms?" "Or this young woman who has problems to deliver  shouts the whole night, alone, and strikes her belly until death?" "Of course, there is a Khmer Rouge Hospital" "I spent weeks in these halls of death" "Drugs are inside Coke bottles" "Patients were injected with coconut juice - it is so pure" "I would have liked to stop hearing the groans, the hiccups, the shouts to stop smelling the warm and rotting flesh" "The dead leave at night" "I used to look for them in the morning on their wooden boards - and I survived" "This man sitting on the floor is too weak:" "He does not eat and no longer moves." "I have thought about him for years I am offering a helping hand to him" "The Khmer Rouge destroyed capitalist drugs" "They chopped roots, made them boil" "They experienced these traditional (and so revolutionary) medicines" "Everywhere there are units to experiment them on human beings - in S21 for instance" "There are not more diplomas, there are only " practical " diplomas" "I used to wash the room, the sick" "Every morning I carried the dead up to the pit" "Sometimes I reach a point of desperation" "There are hollow sounds, bones which bang, hands which are fumbling for someone and find the hand of a child" "I am this child who thinks he is alive and tells this story" "In the midst of life childhood comes back to mind in a bittersweet way with its images" "A childhood which is drowning, a childhood which is wondering :" "How can I still be here?" "Why was I not able to help my family more?" "To think of my childhood is to think about death" "We can understand the Khmers Rouge by observing their images" "Pol Pol creates a reality according to his desire" "Even nature has to comply with it" "Sometimes leaders gathered several villages ...and showed us a movie telling the struggle of the people with bare hands against the powerful colonizers" "Of course we knew the actors and the movie were bad ...and many people slept at the back, exhausted - myself included" "For 4 years we have been moved from site to site" "How to rebel when you own just a black garment and a spoon ?" "When you are lost, when you are hungry" "Today some people say that Buddhism and its way to accept fate is responsible for that" "What were these intellectuals doing at that time?" "Reading?" "Thinking?" "Here, it is not karma or religion which kills but ideology" "At the beginning of any form of totalitarism, there is something fake" "You are afraid of enemies, you are afraid of tree stumps" "I worked in vast forests" "We had to prune to plant corn fields" "It was hot and humid" "There were snakes, spiders, monkeys and lizards that some of my classmates ate" "Let us not be overcome by nature" "Let us swear to attack and make a breakthrough" "These slogans never woke me up" "But the sounds of the forest did" "We became tougher, getting used to fight against the cold, to control our body" "After the thunderstorm, we slept in our wet clothes" "I remember the central market the bitter and flowery fragrance, the fragrance of jasmine" "I remember lovers, their shy gestures and their looks" "I remember a time of affluence" "I remember silk, fish and meat and the smell of boiled chicken which has obsessed for 4 years" "I remember cheerful meals" "At the market of my childhood, people had mouths" "They were laughing, kissing each other" "It's the same street full of people then empty" "The same, indeed, in the outskirts of Phnom Penh" "You just have to open your eyes" "I remember this imperfect and human world" "2000 years of slavery, Pol Pot said" "He's a human being like you and me" "He simply made a choice, a choice of ideology not to say a criminal one" "But it's still very difficult" "This is maybe the reason why I really would like to make this film" "Because nobody is born as an assassin..." "Now, our son is good for blabbering" "He is speaking, speaking, he knows how to make sentences" "I wished he was a schoolteacher like you" "He is shooting our own story" "But there are poor people who are hungry, the rich ones expel them from their land" "He thinks only about the Khmer Rouge" "My father is right" "Before the Khmer Rouge, poor people were already expelled from their land" "They enlisted people because of this injustice" "Then the Americans came" "They dropped more than 500.000 tons of bombs on the country" "So the poor joined the revolution, they raised their fist" "The Khmer Rouge lied to them about the notions of justice equality, happiness, progress They told lies on everything" "And today, the same poor people are digging the earth" "Sometimes I see a child, Well, I am this child" "Everything was difficult for him" "He did not know how to fish, to walk barefoot or to fight" "Years later, he feels guilty for not having helped more those who were poor" "It is said that when we speak about things we can smooth the pain, understand, go through" "I will never find wisdom" "I'm not in search of an image of my relatives I would like to touch them" "Their voice is missing so I stop speaking" "I would like to leave everything, my language, my country - but to no avail" "Childhood comes back to mind" "Now, it is my childhoog which is looking for me" "I see it, it would like to speak to me" "But it is difficult to do it with words" "This black dog is the God of "transition"" "He is leading me to his boat" "Watching him, i think about the man with his fedora and about the river on which corpses were floating" "In the village where I lived" "Families went on living after the departure of the Khmer Rouge" "Young men left to work in Thailand" "The former village leader who was cruel and terrified us on his horse was not arrested" "I think he lived happily and had many children" "The Khmer Rouge mess disappear" "Almost nothing remains:" "pieces of jar, rusty pans, an earth stove" "Everything disappeared like in a cruel movie" "As for the pits near the hospital where I buried so many dead and my mother, my sisters..." "They became a manmade lake made by an international organization" "Bones were taken" "Pumpkin and corn were planted" "But the lake is so salty and so oddly green that nobody dares to use or drink it" "Are the dead there?" "Yes, they are" "Sometimes I have the feeling people walked on them so I pass my way" "There are still souls which are wandering, seeking a place, a sweet and noble thought" "Many people resisted, many of them silently, with a word, with a smile" "Sometimes a single gesture is enough to say " no "" "I think about my father who told his choice to us" "Sometime a silence worth a shout" "Mourning is difficult, funeral is endless" "There are no more cattle wagons" "There are no more slogans nor young guards dressed in black" "Just remains the ground full of blood" "Their flesh is mine" "So we are together" "There are many things a man should not see or know" "And if he saw them it would be better for him to die" "But if one of us sees these things or knows them" "Then he must live to tell about them" "Every morning I used to work over the pit" "My shovel bumped into bones and heads" "Earth is never enough" "I'm the one who is going to get killed or it's already done" "Of course I did not find the missing picture" "I looked for it in vain" "A political movie has to discover what it invented" "So I create this picture, I watch it, I cherish it" "I hold it in my hand as people do with a beloved face" "This missing picture, now I give it to you ...so that it doesn't stop looking for us"