Rithy Panh

«A los trece años –dice Rithy Panh–, perdí a toda mi familia en pocas semanas... Todos ellos barridos por la crueldad y la locura de los jemeres rojos. Me quedé sin familia. Me quedé sin nombre. Me quedé sin rostro. Y fue así como seguí con vida, porque me había quedado sin nada.» Treinta años después del fin del régimen de Pol Pot, que causó la muerte de 1.7000.000 personas, el niño se ha convertido en un cineasta de prestigio. Decide entrevistar a uno de los grandes responsables de ese genocidio: Duch. La eliminación es el relato de esta confrontación fuera de lo común. Un gran libro que ha recibido el Premio Joseph Kessel, el Grand Prix de SGDL de l’Essai, el Premio Essai France Télévisions y el Premio Aujourd’hui.

«Hay que leer La eliminación no como un deber sino como la necesidad absoluta de ponerle palabras a lo innombrable. » (H. Aubron, Le Magazine Littéraire).

«En la línea de un Primo Levi o un Solzhenitsyn, el cineasta franco-camboyano Rithy Panh publica un testimonio excepcional» (Jean Christophe Buisson, Le Figaro).… (mer)

Between 1975 and 1979, the communist inspired Khmer Rouge waged a campaign of terror and mass murder on Cambodia’s population. Up to 1.7 mill. Cambodians lost their lives to famine, hard labor and murder as the urban population was forced into the countryside to fulfill the Khmer Rouge’s dream of an agrarian utopia. In the former Security Prison 21 (code-named “S21”), which was once a high school and is today the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, director Rithy Panh brings two of the few survivors back to discuss what happened there between 1975 and 1979. Painter Vann Nath survived by chance and didn’t suffer the same fate as 17,000 other men, women and children who were taken there, tortured and their so-called ‘crimes’ meticulously documented to justify their execution. The ex-Khmer Rouge guards respond to Nath’s questions with excuses, chilling stoicism or apparent remorse as they recount the atrocities they committed at ages as young as 12 years old. To escape torture, the prisoners would confess to anything, and often denounce everyone they knew – though their final sentence was always death.… (mer)