Pol Pot – Timewatch BBC – and Rithy Panh

A small intro to our foreign readers: The Danish DR/TV has always been the flagship when it comes to documentaries on television in Denmark. It might paradoxically enough continue to be so!

The paradox is that a move to new premises, including the building of a concert house, has resulted in a drastic cut down in staff and money, due to a catastrophic budgetary mismanagement from the public service broadcaster. Less funding for local production gives more foreign purchases and re-runs, and the shelves are full of buys of good documentaries!

One of them is a BBC production from 2005 from the renowned history strand Timewatch, whose editor is John Farren. It is about Pol Pot, the man behind the Cambodian genocide in the late 70’es. The documentary gives us the story of the man behind the genocide – without having more than a couple of sequences with the man himself. The director, Andrew Williams, has therefore chosen to reconstruct some of the scenes as they were told to be by people who worked with Pol Pot in the Khmer Rouge. Very much is based on quotes from interviews with Pol Pot. It is all very nice, the archive is used cleverly, and the research is as we expect from a BBC production, but… it has also this distance and lack of passion of a non-involved producer and director.

For those who want to know more about Cambodia, there is one director to be mentioned: Rithy Panh, Cambodian, born in 1964, escaped the country to settle in Paris making several strong and passionate documentaries and dramas about his own country. The one that comes closest to describing the terror during the Pol Pot regime is “S21” that can be bought on dvd at http://www.editionsmontparnasse.fr/dvd

Watched on DR2 2008-01-04.

Pol Pot, BBC, 2005, Andrew Williams.