This week we’re excited to present a conversation from the 2025 edition of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema with Meeting with Pol Pot director Rithy Panh and journalist Elizabeth Becker, moderated by FLC’s Vice President, Programming, Florence Almozini.
Meeting with Pol Pot will open at Film at Lincoln Center next Friday, June 13 with in-person Q&As at select screenings opening weekend. Get tickets at filmlinc.org/polpot
In 1978, three French journalists arrive in Cambodia to survey the country and interview its leader, Pol Pot—but after a picture-perfect arrival, cracks begin to emerge in the murderous regime’s facade of respectability. For Cambodian-born Rithy Panh, the damage inflicted upon his homeland by the Khmer Rouge has fueled a lifetime of innovative work in the vein of 2013’s The Missing Picture, which reconstructed the period’s events in part through clay-figurine dioramas. This real-life journalistic excursion, based on true events detailed in Elizabeth Becker’s nonfiction book When the War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution, is brought to life thanks to exemplary lead performances from Irène Jacob, Grégoire Colin, and Cyril Gueï, meticulously conjuring the sights and sounds of 1978 Cambodia with the assistance of archival footage and more clay figurines. The result is a unique admixture—historical horror paired with a rich meditation on the impossibility of portraying it—that only Panh could make. A Strand Releasing release.
