Meeting with Pol Pot
Oscar®-nominated filmmaker Rithy Panh (2013’s The Missing Picture) directs this historical drama that unfolds like a horror film, as three French journalists in 1978 Cambodia learn the terrible truth about the Khmer Rouge regime.
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Sunday, May 18, 2025
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- Matinee
Tuesday, May 20, 2025
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- Matinee
An important and competent imagining of a 1978 meeting between three French journalists and leaders of the Khmer Rouge at the height of its power to control Cambodia. The Cambodian writer/director Panh uses reenactments, historic footage, and an extensive maquette with small figures of the people involved to tell the story of the journalists' realization of the horrors perpetrated against the Cambodian people by the Pol Pot regime.
This film is a French production, with notable French actors, directed by a Cambodian documentarian, and is based on a book by Elizabeth Becker, a Seattle writer who attended the University of Washington and interviewed Pol Pot and reported on Cambodia during the regime for the Washington Post.
The director, who escaped the Khmer Rouge and lived in refugee camps until he made his way to Paris, where he studied film, has made dozens of documentaries telling the stories of Cambodian people’s lives under the severely punitive Khmer Rouge regime. Panh appears in this film in a cameo as the heinous Pol Pot in the scene of the French journalists’ long-sought-after meeting with the supreme leader. In recent times, he has established a film and photography center in Cambodia to preserve the nation’s history.
Meeting with Pol Pot serves as a searing reminder of the possibility of evil actions against innocent citizens living under a genocidal dictator.
—Mayumi Tsutakawa
- Original Language Title: Rendez-Vous avec Pol Pot
- Director: Rithy Panh
- Principal Cast: Irène Jacob, Grégoire Colin, Cyril Gueï, Bunhok Lim, Somaline Mao
- Country: France, Cambodia, Taiwan, Qatar, Turkey
- Year: 2024
- Running Time: 113 min.
- Producer: Catherine Dussart, Roger Huang, Justine O.
- Screenplay: Pierre Erwan Guillaume, Rithy Panh
- Cinematographers: Aymerick Pilarski, Mesa Prum
- Editors: Rithy Panh, Matthieu Laclau
- Music: Marc Marder
- Website: Official Film Website
- Awards: Official Academy Awards® Submission 2025 (International Feature)
- Filmography: Graves Without a Name (2018), The Missing Picture (2013), S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003)
- Language: French, Khmer
- Has Subtitles: Yes
- Format: DCP
- US Distributor: Strand Releasing
- International Sales: Playtime