The Killing Fields review

 Number 382 on the top 1000 films of all time is a biographical drama 'The Killing Fields.'

Set during the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, the Killing Fields details the relationship of two journalists during the Cambodian genocide. One journalist is the American 'Sydney Schanberg' (Sam Waterston) and the other is Sydney's Cambodian interpreter Dith Pran (Haing S. Ngor.) John Malkovich co-stars as Sydney's photographer Al Rockoff.

Whenever I watch films about subjects like war or genocide. I am always of the mantra or go hard or go home. The Holocaust film 'The Pianist' goes hard and it's all the better for it. However, I cam coming to believe that this doesn't always need to be the way. the Killing Fields is subtle and understated. This isn't to say it shies away from the horrors of the genocide, but it far more selective in what it chooses to show.

We see the build-up of prisoners being executed, but we never see these executions first hand. So when we do see scenes like Pran escaping his internment camp to find himself tumbling into a pit of skeletons, the impact is all the stronger. The fact these skeletons are the remains of the executed prisoners makes the image even scarier.

A recurring issue I find with films about world historical events told from a Western lens is that there is the tendency to wrongly focus on the Western character. I wouldn't go far to say there was a white saviour narrative. Sydney is no hero and definitely no saviour. When he and the other Western journalists are being evacuated home, they do all they can to take Pran with them - even going so far to making him a fake passport. When this fails, they have no choice, but to leave them behind.

Sydney later acknowledges had a chance to leave long ago, but Sydney convinced him to stay. Back in the US, Sydney uses every contact he has to find Pran, but it is Pran who escapes and find a Red Cross refugee camp near the border with Thailand. Obviously growing up in the Western world, I view things through a Western lens. And so narratives like Sydney's are very familiar to me. Overly-familiar I would say. It wasn't until halfway when the film switched to Pran in the internment camp did I start taking serious interest. Pran was an infinitely more interesting character and I was rooting for him to escape. He was also a very clever man, playing dumb when interred, as he knows he'll be killed otherwise. If he is even suspected of being a working professional then the regime would kill him.

And all due credit to Haing Ngor. Having survived three stints in Cambodian prison camps, he went onto win an acting Oscar for this role, despite having no previous acting experience. He is the only Asian actor to win an Oscar and he very much deserved it. It is so sad his life was cut short when he was killed in a 1996 robbery.

Please give this film a watch. Albeit, it is very traumatic, but it makes for absolutely essential viewing.