Original subtitles

THE MISSING PICTURE

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 fifty?

Because I've seen troubled times

when fear alternates with hope?

The memory is there now

pounding at my temples.

I'd like to be rid of it.

With clay and 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 chatted 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 bombs drew near in the 1970s.

I remember the first who died.

Our fear.

My sorrow as a child.

So many pictures go by again and again in the world.

We think seeing them is owning 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 April 17, 1975.

There were no cries of joy,

only silent expectancy.

I was there.

I saw 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 hand.

The enemy, that's me.

I am thirteen.

The central bank blows up with all its money.

There is no turning back.

The city is impure.

The city is corrupt.

It is emptied within hours.

Two 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 17,

a day overflowing with joy."

The revolution is pure. No room for humans.

Now Phnom Penh can be filmed

like in the prophecy of Puth Tumneay.

"Houses with no occupants, streets with no pedestrians,

stairs no one will climb,

flowing rivers of blood."

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.

Souvenirs were forbidden, all personal effects.

Suddenly there are no more individuals,

only numbers.

They cut our hair.

They take our watches, glasses,

toys, books.

They dye our clothes black.

They change our names.

We are the new people.

Bourgeois, intellectuals, 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 unsettling smoke.

Concrete dikes and rice fields.

No people.

All of society is organised collectively and militarily

in working units.

"Angkar cares for all of you, comrades,

brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers!"

The Angkar is the organisation.

It is all. It is each.

The young Khmer Rouge,

the village chief,

the torture supervisor,

and Pol Pot.

They surveil this barefoot people

of 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 fertiliser for rice.

To hang on,

you must hide within yourself a strength, a memory,

an idea that no one can take from you.

For if a picture can be stolen, a thought cannot

"The Angkar requests you attend

a study session to reconstruct yourself.

Comrades,

soon we'll be masters of the water,

of the earth and elements,

every hectare yielding 3 tons of rice.

Or five. Or seven.

Then we will be ten 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 Angkar.

Long live the extraordinary grandiose Kampuchean Revolution!

Long life to a new society free of rich and poor!"

We raise our fists.

We repeat 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.

The embankments are paved.

There is order in everything.

Flying over this utopia

is a red flag

and of course this truth:

"Comrade, 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!

Work in the rice fields! Don't count on the heavens!"

These slogans have never left me.

Sometimes I still hear them.

Former society thought only of feasting.

Collectivism is the fertiliser and the fodder.

From now on, a saucepan is individualistic.

It is forbidden to own 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 to destroy.

In Phnom Penh, there was a people to wipe out.

Conquest through emptiness is a picture glaring with simplicity.

The Khmer Rouge want a man of metal,

a pure instrument of revolution.

Khmer Rouge leaders

are "the universal homogenous state."

They never look at each other.

There is of course Pol Pot, Brother no. 1,

whom we recognise by his fan.

And then his comrades:

Nuon Chea,

Ieng Sary,

Khieu Samphan,

Son Sen.

"Rise damned of the Earth!"

The damned, that's us.

We who work the fields, in chains,

wandering like ghosts.

In this capital, four years empty,

remains the Central Committee

and Ponear Yat High School

which becomes Centre S21.

Here they whip,

they electrocute,

they cut,

they force feed excrement,

they get confessions.

It all starts with purity and ends with hate.

I know the Khmer Rouge photographed executions.

Why?

For proof?

To complete a report?

What man having shot this scene wouldn't want it missing?

I look for this picture.

If I ever find it

I could not show it, of course.

What would the picture of a dead man reveal?

I prefer this anonymous young woman

who defies the camera

and the eye of her torturer,

staring at us still.

Scarlet blood

covering Kampuchean cities and plains, our fatherland,

sublime blood of workers and peasants,

sublime blood of men and women,

revolutionary fighters,

blood turned to implacable hatred and resolved fighting,

you freed us from slavery.

Yet, one does not film with impunity.

I see these child labourers,

their hands, their faces,

their weary bodies.

This young avant-garde works toward its own destruction.

At night, I told stories from before

of ghosts,

witches,

lost travellers,

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 code.

Scarlet blood that covers cities and plains,

will you cover the moon too?

I dreamt of walking on it like Neil Armstrong,

light-footed, childlike.

"One small step for man,

one giant leap for mankind."

"But who are they?" asks a comrade.

These people 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 lies not in capitalist propaganda.

It is here

for we who are hungry.

"Long live the independent masterful way

of Democratic Kampuchea's Angkar.

Long live its extraordinary clairvoyance."

On our moon, there is nothing.

Parched earth and dust bury everything.

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 any more.

It is strange to drink mud.

The buffalo watch us.

"What odd humans to drink our water."

A Nestle tin becomes our unit of measure.

It contains 250 grams of rice.

Very soon, famine strikes.

These 250 grams, we share them daily.

Seven of us.

Then sixteen.

Then twenty-five.

We share hunger.

Mother fights for us.

She builds a hut of branches, leaves and vines.

Each day she walks two hours

so we may drink clean water.

She gets a half ration approved for father.

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 shed not a tear.

Not before the Khmer Rouge.

That night

she tells me how my father should have been buried

by his 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,

that we should be a free people.

He didn't abandon us.

He was teaching us free will.

I still feel his soul went home

where he can at last recite in peace

his favourite poem by Prévert:

"Black hair

Black hair, caressed by waves

Black hair

Black hair tussled by winds."

Here, schools become extermination centres.

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 your pen,

the rice field your paper."

"Here is the school of applied electricity

intended to train technicians.

The students must be children of poor peasants,

or the lower middle class,

or girls and boys from the revolutionary army.

Comrade Thaon is 16 years old.

At 9 he joined the Revolution

and the revolutionary army.

He fought many battles.

He was also wounded.

There are many children like him

at the front and behind it.

They are countless.

They all have exceptional biographies.

Today they work 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 neighbour.

I loved the wonderful wigs and costumes,

the colours and gold,

the land of giants and fairytales.

I loved it backstage

where beautiful actresses seemed to dance for me.

I collected film scraps

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 directors

were sent to the fields.

A Khmer Rouge film is always a slogan.

"Practice is worth all theories

so no personal ideas!

He who is ill with 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 as a 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 no. 1 was inspired by young humanity.

The original people.

The Jarai,

the Kuoy,

the Bunong,

a 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 in all its glory!"

These peasants, scorned, abandoned,

adhere to the fight for justice.

They'd 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 theft, no 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.

Return to the old ways or be destroyed.

Pol Pot says:

"Those we cannot re-educate,

we will fight like enemies."

"The Angkar never uses any object

from imperialist or feudal society."

Capitalist automobiles confess their crimes.

They too are re-educated.

These cars work to edify the new country.

Evenings, after the worksite, are 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 denounces his mother for picking mangoes.

The child shouts:

"The comrade recognises 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 human?

The mother closes her eyes.

Is it to picture her child?

She says nothing.

Then she is taken into the forest by guards

and never returns.

I want to escape the mud, the 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 world knows 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.

My brother disappeared in Phnom Penh,

April 17, 1975.

With his guitar,

the Khmer Rouge must not have liked him.

Not his smile,

not his teenager's bangs,

not his songs.

Colour has vanished

like laughter, song and dance.

Our daily 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 fulfil 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 die.

Feet swollen.

Face swollen.

As if water is all that's left.

The little girl is shaky with hunger,

so she steals corn.

The leader catches her,

and brings her back to us.

It's 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 swollen, her eyes blank.

She sighs.

She calls her mother.

She calls her father.

Then she calls no more,

and we buried her.

The other two children die too.

I wish to be rid of this picture of hunger and suffering.

So I show it to you.

The mother is taken to the hospital

where she learns her daughter of 16 has died.

Here, everyone dies.

Without a word she strokes her forehead.

She picks lice from the beautiful gaunt face.

Then she too lies down on the wooden planks.

Fishing is forbidden.

Yet fish abound by the hundreds.

In hiding I catch one.

Two days later I take it to my mother,

but she has already died.

So, I understood I would be alone.

I pictured 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 fulfil our 1977 political duty

with an extraordinary great leap forward."

I have become one of these children at the worksites.

Looking closer 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."

The children revolt.

Of course

"Each must count on no one else!"

But the 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 worksite,

we must dig 3 cubic metres of dirt in the morning

and make 25 to 30 kilos of fertiliser in the afternoon

from leaves and cow manure.

But there are so few cows,

trees and leaves

that these quotas are unattainable.

If we don't manage to extract 3 cubic metres,

they are raised to 5 cubic metres.

"Work eagerly!

No defeatism 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 inquisitively.

This man beat those who didn't follow his rules.

We were forbidden to dig for roots to eat,

and forbidden to speak.

He ate alone and had his own food.

So did his dog.

We shared our children's rations.

Those in Paris or elsewhere

who loved our slogans,

who read books,

did they see 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,

its voices.

Childhood is a refrain.

I haven't been home since April 17, 1975.

Yet I remember every detail,

the paintings,

the doors,

the jugs,

the hallways.

My house became a gambling dive,

a karaoke,

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 labour camp

and we were so hungry.

A huge bale of rice straw

washed up on the riverbank.

We even found eggs.

So we ate.

With film too, the harvests are glorious.

There is grain.

There are the calm, determined faces.

Like a painting.

A poem.

At last I see the Revolution they so promised us.

It exists only on film.

This rice was not for us.

Was it reserved for our leaders?

Or shipped abroad, since marked in Arabic numerals?

Or were these sacks film props?

Full of sand?

Our every move was scrutinised,

our every breath,

even our silence.

But the great famine escaped the Khmer Rouge leaders.

Did they not know?

Did they not see?

Could they not act?

Does the truth lie in glorious slogans?

Or in these pictures, which 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 the Angkar's directives.

Throughout the land,

they have fulfilled their revolutionary duties.

They have transformed the sad, dry regions of former times,

poor and without drinking water.

Now there are ponds great and small,

canals interconnecting,

green rice fields and orchards.

These cooperatives are founding a new society

purged of corruption and rogues of all sorts.

They are founding a new society

that is collectivist, uncorrupt,

equal, 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 rampant in the fields.

The one who shot this footage, slow and true,

was named Ang Sarun,

a Khmer Rouge cameraman,

to whom we also owe this speech by Pol Pot.

Why this haze?

A technical mistake?

Or did he mean to show the children in rags?

To show Brother no. 1 the true state of the nation?

The cameraman is tortured

then executed.

His body disappears.

His story disappears.

But not this film.

"Let us brandish ever higher

the red standard of the revolution!"

It sounds like Mao,

but it's the Angkar.

Pol Pot goes to the airport in person

to greet two Chinese leaders:

Zhang Chunqiao

and Geng Biao.

Chinese comrades inspired the policy and ideology

of Democratic Kampuchea.

This picture of fraternity is not missing.

The great leap forward, isn't it wonderful?

Is not each day a celebration?

Is not Kampuchea succeeding

through purity and void

where the Chinese 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,

raw snails.

That's how dehumanisation starts.

With hunger,

with illness,

with physical decay.

Who filmed the sick people?

Who filmed the pagodas turned hospices?

The worm-eaten knee of my bunk neighbour?

Or the young woman

who can't deliver,

who screams all night,

alone,

hitting her belly, to death?

Of course, there's 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 wished I could not hear the moaning,

the hiccups, the screaming,

no longer smell damp rotting flesh.

The dead leave by 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 a hand out to him.

The Khmer Rouge have destroyed capitalist medicine.

They chop roots,

they boil them.

They experiment with traditional remedies,

therefore revolutionary.

Everywhere are experimental units using humans.

At S21, for example.

"There are no more diplomas!

Only practical diplomas!"

I washed the hall.

I washed the sick.

And every morning

I carried the dead down to the pit.

Sometimes, I teeter on the void.

There are hollow sounds,

bones knocking,

hands that seek and find those of a child,

a child who tells himself he's alive, who tells the tale,

that's me.

In the middle of life

childhood returns

sweet and bitter

with its images.

Childhood as drowning.

Childhood as question.

Why am I here?

Why couldn't I have helped my loved ones more?

Already in childhood

death is present.

We understand the Khmer Rouge on seeing their footage.

Pol Pot forges a reality conformant with his desire.

Even nature must conform.

Sometimes,

the cadres gathered several villages

and showed a film

boasting our bare-handed fight

against the colonial powers.

Of course,

we knew the actors were bad,

that the film was bad.

Many slept in the back, exhausted,

like me.

For four years,

we were moved from worksite to worksite.

How to revolt when all you've got are black clothes and a spoon?

When you are lost?

When you are hungry?

Some say now 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 is ideology.

At the start of all totalitarianism is falsity.

"Afraid of your enemies?

You're afraid of tree trunks."

I worked in the great forests.

We had to cut trees and plant corn.

There was the heat, the humidity,

the snakes, the tarantulas,

the monkeys,

and the lizards that some of my comrades ate.

"Don't 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 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 four years.

I remember happy meals.

At my childhood market

people had mouths.

They laughed and talked. They kissed.

It's the same street,

lively then empty.

Yes, the same,

in the neighbourhoods of Phnom Penh,

if you 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 sure jabbers now.

On and on he rambles.

At least he's good with words.

You'd rather he be a teacher, like you.

But it's our story he films.

That's us.

What about the poor and hungry?

The rich expropriated them too, not just the Khmer Rouge.

The father is right.

Before the Khmer Rouge,

the poor were thrown off their land.

They were enrolled because of this injustice.

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,

equality,

happiness,

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 couldn't fish,

or walk barefoot, or fight.

Years later,

he feels guilty for not helping the destitute.

They say talking helps.

You understand.

You get over it.

For me,

this wisdom will never be.

I seek no picture of loved ones

but rather to touch them.

Their voice is missing,

so I won't tell.

I want to leave it all,

my language, my country,

in vain,

and my childhood returns.

Now,

it is the boy who seeks me.

I see him.

He wants to speak to me.

But words are hard to find.

This black dog

is the god of passage.

It takes me to its boat.

When I look at it,

I see the man with the felt hat

and the river floating with corpses.

In the village where I lived,

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 hear,

and had many children.

Their canteen is gone.

Hardly anything remains.

A few shards of jugs,

rusted pans,

a clay oven.

It's all over

like a cruel film.

As for the pits near the hospital

where I buried so many

and my mother, and my sisters,

they have become a manmade lake

dug by an international organisation.

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,

the burial endless.

There are no more cattle cars,

no more slogans,

no young guards in black.

There's only the blood-drenched earth.

Their flesh is my flesh.

So we are together.

There are many things that Man should not see or know.

Should he see them,

he'd be better off dying.

But should any one of us see or know them

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 me 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 cease to seek us out.

Subtitles: Letitia Farris Toussaint

Subtitling: LVT - Paris