Ghost City

Last night, we went to Meta-House to watch Kampuchea : Death and Rebirth - a documentary made in early 1979, just after Phnom Penh fell to the invading Vietnamese forces. The East German filmmakers Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann were some of the first foreign journalists to get access to the country after the Khmer Rouge fell from power. The film has an overtly political agenda but was both powerful and informative. The extensive interviews with Khmer Rouge mouthpiece Ieng Thirith are quite hard to swallow, despite the filmmakers intentions to discredit her (Ieng Thirith is one of the five senior Khmer Rouge officials currently in detention and awaiting trial at the ECCC tribunal in Phnom Penh). However, the interviews with the few inhabitants of a decimated city and their incredibly raw emotional accounts of the events of the last four years are compelling. One group of university students had just returned to their college. Intellectuals were one of the groups particularly targeted by the Khmer Rouge and this group of around 100 students had collectively lost more than 800 family members - for most of them their entire family. It's clear that as some of the few educated people left in the country, they would be particularly responsible for reconstruction. Also striking from the footage was how developed Phnom Penh was prior to the 1970's - it has been described as the pearl of South-East Asia - the level of sophistication in education, healthcare and infrastructure was all suprising to me, all of which was destroyed by the Khmer Rouge.

Most of all though, and the reason I would thoroughly recommend this documentary if you ever get a chance to watch it, are the incredible images of an empty city. In 1975, the Khmer Rouge literally emptied Phom Penh and marched all the residents out to rural communes (read labour camps) in an attempt to create their agrarian utopia. Imagine a city evacuated in a single day and left deserted for four years. The filmmakers got access to the city just after it was taken by the Vietnamese, and the footage is unbelievable. Everything deserted, the signs of a hurried departure but also undisturbed houses full of possessions, and nature taking the streets back. The Vietnamese had to work quickly to restore essential services such as water and electricity before the city could be repopulated. Engineers are shown at the city power station and water plant trying to get systems back online. I think the eeriest scene in the film was the footage of ceiling fans and air conditioners in houses across the city coming back to life when the power was restored after their owners left them on four years earlier.