The space of sorrow: a historic video dialogue between survivors and perpetrators of the Cambodian killing fields

Abstract

In this article filmmaker and anthropologists collaborate to explore an alternative Cambodian strategy for truth seeking that grew out of the making and release of the documentary film, Enemies of the People, and culminated in a historic videoconference between former Khmer Rouge soldiers in Bangkok and killing fields survivors in Long Beach, California. Along the way the figures of ‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator’ were transformed becoming more nuanced and complex. Because Khmer Rouge soldiers and their victims have been represented in many genre – written, spoken, and filmic – we examine this transformation through the conceptual lens of chronotope, the ‘essential ground’ of time-space created within a literary work to represent events. At its core is dialogue, through which new interpretations of the self and others beyond a victim-perpetrator narrative can be constituted.