Word: cambodias
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...Killing Fields recounts the true story of American reporter Sydney Schanberg and his Cambodian assistant Dith Pran. During the early 1970s American bombers poured several thousand tons of TNT onto Cambodia, resulting, quite logically, in the death of several thousand innocent Cambodians. Schanberg covered these American atrocities for the New York Times, with Pran working overtime as photographer-translator-copy boy. When the Khmer Rouge, the target of Nixon's B-52s, managed to overrun Phnom Phenh, Schanberg decided not to join the general exodus of Westerners, trusting to the aura of untouchability bestowed upon anyone possessing a Times press...
...role of Dith Pran went to Dr. Haing S. Ngor, a Cambodian refugee whose own exploits mirrored those of Dith Pran's. Perhaps his lack of thespian training accounts for the excessive Oriental inscrutability his brings to his part. But then living in the paranoid hell of Cambodia made silence and inconspicuousness golden virtues. In fact, Ngor's most effective scenes occur when he doesn't speak at all. After Pran is exiled to a rural concentration camp, he must struggle to appear nothing more than a simple peasant. His Khmer Rouge, captors, constantly suspicious, address him in French...
Director Joffe and screenwriter Bruce Davidson go to great pains to draw a parallel between Schanberg's abandonment of Pran and America's abandonment of Cambodia. When Schanberg is given an award for his Cambodian coverage, he gives a tear-filled acceptance speech laying the blame for Cambodia's agonies on the long-gone doorstep of the Nixon administration. Just afterwards Rockoff confronts Schanberg in the men's room, reminding Schanberg that the single-minded persistence that got him the award might also have resulted in the death of his friend...
Attacks like the strike against Rithysen have become an annual dry-season ritual in the six years since Viet Nam invaded Kampuchea, then known as Cambodia, and installed the Heng Samrin regime in Phnom Penh. Even though the brutal former Khmer Rouge government of Pol Pot had been blamed for the deaths of as many as 2 million of the country's 6 million people between 1975 and 1978, many Kampucheans fought back against the Vietnamese invasion as best they could. Some 500,000 civilians and several thousand guerrillas took refuge in camps close to the Thai border. Year after...
...Killing Fields. One has to admire the honesty of a film that includes among its other acuities an intelligent capsule review of itself. For in recounting the tormented friendship of Schanberg, the New York Times correspondent who won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for his accounts of the fall of Cambodia, and his native assistant, Dith Pran (Haing S. Ngor), the film does sacrifice the narrative coherence and the heroically moral resolutions old movies imposed on reality. Instead it offers the anguish decent men feel when they stand impotent before the high, harsh tides of history and the consequences of their...