Images and Words: Remembrance and Reconstruction of the Cambodian Genocide by Rithy Panh

“The truth is poison,” goes a Khmer saying. Between 1975 and 1979, an estimated two million Cambodians were massacred following this “truth” that Khmers called “ideology.” To fully grasp the dynamics of this poisonous “truth,” Rithy Panh, a survivor of the Khmer Rouge genocide, focused on the legacy of the regime through the examination of its agents and atrocities. Cinema became the first medium that motivated Panh to revisit this most tragic chapter of Cambodian history. In his films, Panh personally encounters the persecutors and asks them to speak, without being a part of the discourse himself. Elimination (2011) emerges from this silence, the strategy of dissimulation in his cinema. In this work, Panh revisits his experience of encountering the persecutors, while expressing himself by presenting a complete picture of the genocide to the public. This article aims to examine narrative and visual strategies utilized by Panh in order to communicate the reality of the Cambodian Genocide as a witness, filmmaker and writer. I argue that Panh’s consummate discourse stands as a visual-narrative construction, where the fragments of history are broken down to reconstruct the memory of the genocide through a combination of images and words