The Killings Fields is a chilling film about the Cambodian genocide and the regime of the Khmer Rouge. Released in 1984, five years after the end of Pol Pot’s reign, the film tries to capture the chaos, devastation, and unrelenting violence that occurred in Cambodia a country that was thrown into conflict by the reverberations of the Vietnam War. Throughout the film, thoughts of fear and violence flood the viewer through scenes of bombings and guerrilla warfare to the dangerous score that plays behind Pran’s time in the labor camp. The Killing Fields uses understated depictions of violence to show the viewer how it affected the Cambodians and to explain how genocides occur as a whole. Within the first ten minutes of The Killing Fields, there
David Chandler explains that many Cambodians saw “their country as essentially a happy place, being visited by war.” He also says they were stunned by the soldiers of the Khmer Rouge, who “‘didn 't even look like Cambodians, they seemed to be from the jungle, or a different world.’” In the film, the Khmer Rouge close in on the capital city by cutting off the road to the airport. During this scene, which includes Schanberg and Pran darting in and out of a Coca Cola factory while citizens are fleeing the area, a young girl’s cries can be heard over the din of machine guns and mass exodus. Though children often cry, it is easy to see how Joffé wanted her tears to mean something more, to show the despair of a country tearing itself
The Killing Fields provides them with a screen that bears the words: “Cambodia’s Torment Has Not Yet Ended. The Refugee Camps on the Thai Border Are Still Crowded with the Children of the Killing Fields.” The violence inflicted upon Cambodia’s people would not be validated until 2014 when the leaders of the Khmer Rouge were formally charged with genocide, which means that in many ways, especially psychologically, violence was still being inflicted upon the victims of the Khmer Rouge and their families. Stephen P. Marks describes this phenomenon in his article that documents the history of the elusive justice of victims of the Cambodian Genocide. There were several show trials about the Genocide after the Khmer Rouge collapsed. Pol Pot was put on trial by members of his own party in 1997. When UN officials asked that the Khmer Rouge surrender him, he died, quite suspiciously, of a heart attack. That trial and the trials in 1979 conducted by Vietnam were internal, corrupt affairs. An International tribunal, Marks explains, would lead to better post trial peace building and would validate the suffering of the Cambodians lost in the killing fields. In one title screen, The Killing Fields implies that for years Cambodians have been quietly violated as they waited for
In some ways, Kellie’s depiction was entirely bias and unfair, as to the choice of footage used; there was no indication of the various charities that aim to alleviate poverty within Australia, including: Salvos, Anglicare and St Vincent de Paul. This is entirely symbolic of how the media falsely depicts those in poverty, with the pure aim of entertaining the audience, showing a complete lack of empathy. Similarly, the concept of disrespect was evident in tourists that we saw at the public restaurants we visited throughout the journey; some were excessively drinking, whilst others were littering or using obscene language at local Khmer people. From a personal perspective, a lack of understanding between any individuals, whether they are disadvantaged or advantaged, contradicts Christian values and ideals, making the producer and the other tourists somewhat disrespectful and uncompassionate towards the Mt Druitt and Cambodian community
Daniel Goldhagen (2009) states that in less than four years, Cambodia’s political leaders induced their followers to turn Cambodia’s backwards and regressing society into a massive concentration camp in which they steadily killed victims. Furthermore, a deeper understanding of the Cambodian genocide is provided within Luong Ung’s personal narrative, “First They Killed My Father” (2000). Ung’s memoir is a riveting account of the Cambodian genocide, which provides readers with a personalized account of her family’s experience during the genocide. She informs readers of the causes of the Cambodian genocide and she specifies the various eliminationist techniques used to produce the ideological Khmer vision. Nonetheless, she falls short because
“The Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot’s Regime”. Mtholyoke.edu. 11 May 2005. Web. 7 May 2014.
The narrator, Le Ly Hayslip was born into a family of six in a town called Ka Ly in Vietnam. The villagers of Ka Ly fight for both side of the war; Hayslip’s own brothers were split between the communist north and the puppet government controlled south and so were her family. By day the village was looked over by Republicans, but by night they were under...
Recent history is replete with egregious, widespread and often systematic wrongdoings: genocide, torture, and mass killing. Cambodia, South Africa, Afghanistan, Iraq, Rwanda, and Guatemala are examples where these grave political injustices have occurred. Histories of violence and humanitarian atrocities leave marks of damage, despair, and pain that can only justice can begin to heal. Hence the central question of Daniel Philpott’s book Just and Unjust Peace: An Ethic of Political Reconciliation: “What does justice consist of in the wake of its massive despoliation?” The answer, Philpott argues, is political reconciliation. However, in investigating two of Philpott’s six practices of reconciliation—apology
Most people in the world have not heard of the genocide going on in Laos today. Most people have not taken notice, read about it or bother to spend more than thirty seconds of their lives learning about it. The world has managed to almost entirely ignore the genocide of the Hmong people in Laos for over 30 years and still allows this crime against humanity to continue. Since the 1970s, the ethnic Hmong people in the Southeast Asian country of Laos have been persecuted by the Laotian government (Malakunas, 2000). This harassment is a direct result of the Hmong’s link to the Central Intelligence Agency in the United States in what has become to be known as the Secret War (Malakunas, 2000). The Laotian government officials directing this massacre have not been detained due to lack of evidence (Sommer P.4).
As a young teen, she huddled in a bomb shelter during intense artillery shelling of her hamlet, escaping out a rear exit just as US Marines shouted for the “mama-sans” and “baby-sans” (women and children) to come out the front. She got as far as the nearby river before she heard gunfire. Returning the next day, she encountered a scene that was seared into her brain. “I saw dead people piled up in the hamlet. I saw my mom’s body and my younger siblings,” told Ho Thi Van. She lost eight family members in that 1968 massacre. In all, according to the local survivors, thirty-seven people, including twenty-one children were killed by the Marines. She then joins the guerrillas and fought the Americans and their South Vietnamese allies until she was grievously wounded, losing an eye in battle in
"Pol Pot vs Hitler." Killing in the Name of. N.p., 26 Jan. 2012. Web. 27 Apr. 2014. .
Greenfield, Daniel M. "Crime of Complicity in Genocide: How the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia Got It Wrong, and Why It Matters." The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 98.3 (2008): 921-24. HeinOnline. Web. 18 Apr. 2011.
The Cambodian Genocide has the historical context of the Vietnam War and the country’s own civil war. During the Vietnam War, leading up to the conflicts that would contribute to the genocide, Cambodia was used as a U.S. battleground for the Vietnam War. Cambodia would become a battle ground for American troops fighting in Vietnam for four years; the war would kill up to 750,00 Cambodians through U.S. efforts to destroy suspected North Vietnamese supply lines. This devastation would take its toll on the Cambodian peoples’ morale and would later help to contribute that conflicts that caused the Cambodian genocide. In the 1970’s the Khmer rouge guerilla movement would form. The leader of the Khmer rouge, Pol Pot was educated in France and believed in Maoist Communism. These communist ideas would become important foundations for the ideas of the genocide, and which groups would be persecuted. The genocide it’s self, would be based on Pol Pot’s ideas to bring Cambodia back to an agrarian society, starting at the year zero. His main goal was to achieve this, romanticized idea of old Cambodia, based on the ancient Cambodian ruins, with all citizens having agrarian farming lives, and being equal to each other. Due to him wanting society to be equal, and agrarian based, the victims would be those that were educated, intellectuals, professionals, and minority ethnic g...
This shows the fear of Paul Berlin and how he thinks that war is a joke and realizes that it is real life and he has to face his fear of war.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is a western film. The film has both positive and negative components that make it an uneasy viewing, due to immoral behaviours and sense of unhinged characteristics. The director Andrew Dominik has great control in creating beautiful pictures throughout the film. Dominik gives the best understanding of Jesse James possible so that we, as viewers, are able to become better acquainted (more familiar) with Jesse’s character.
There were two interviews that Goldhagen held that I felt held the raw truth and was something devastating to see and hear about, one with a man that participated in the death of thousands of Tutsi’s and another with a woman who told a story of her own personal experience. The man talks about how for him it was almost hard to kill Tutsi’s since they had the same skin as him and how he didn’t kill children because it was sad knowing that you still had to. He says it was like a cloud covered their hearts and it was like a darkness that came over them, making them kill others. The young woman talked about how her mother, father, and brother were chopped into pieces with a machete. She goes on to tell Goldhagen that the people that killed her family were members of her community and even family friends. This lead Goldhagen to the questions ‘How do neighbors turn against neighbors?’ And ‘Why do the killers kill?’ these are just two of the questions that Goldhagen tries to find the answer to during the
He visits Vietnam to remember all of the feelings he felt during war and hoped that his daughter Kathleen would feel the same emotions he experience: “I’d wanted to take my daughter to the places I’d seen as a soldier. I wanted to show her the Vietnam that kept me awake at night..” (176). He even laid on the river where Kiowa died, hoping to remember what he felt when Kiowa died. However, it is important to notice that, as he recollected his memories during the war, he seems to find peace with the war as all of the negative emotions he felt during the war: “ I felt something go shut in my heat while something else swung open” (179).
At the beginning of the movie, Susan, who is an American tourist in Morocco, gets shot by a Moroccan boy, Yusef. Because of this, other tourists in the bus all scattered into the village. The scene in the village showed many examples of stereotypes and disconnection of the communications. The other tourists feel many stereotypes about the small village, and they get afraid. The stereotype that they have is the people in the village might hurt them; they think the people in the village are dangerous, and might take them as hostage for terror. They decide to leave the village without Susan and her husband, Richard. Richard asks them to wait, but the tourists did not want to. This scene of when Richard and the other tourists get into an argument exposes the selfishness that people have. Because of the stereotype and selfishness they had for each other, Richard and the tourists were not able to communicate well. They did not consider each other’s situations, did not listen to each other, and held fast to one’s view.