Still Swimming To Cambodia

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I watched The Killing Fields again this weekend. I was expecting it to be lacking something because of the way film has changed in the twenty years since it was made but I was wrong. It captures all the confusion of the war in which the Khmer Rouge overthrew the Cambodian Government, the sadness at not getting Dith Pran out of the country and the simplicity and downright evil of the KR regime. I kept seeing nineteen-eighty-four in the attitude of the kids towards the past. The teenager with the handful of blue bags used to suffocate her victims was especially chilling - far more so than the gruesome pile of decomposing bodies into which Pran stumbled while trying to escape.