Enemies Of The People review

Today the killing fields of Cambodia are nourished by mass graves, filled over a bloody four years in the late ’70s. These rice fields and forests provided the human hunting grounds for followers of the communist Khmer Rouge regime, which has since come to light as one of the most brutal of the 20th Century.

In Enemies of the People the shroud of silence that surrounded these massacres for 30 years is finally lifted as Thet Sambath takes the roots of history into his own hands. Scorned by the murder of his family, Sambeth’s tenacity is remarkable as he shakes the blood-stained hands of the leaders, perpetrators and foot soldiers he interviews. But Sambeth’s mission, 10 years in the making, is not one of vengeance, but truth.

Over this period he pays regular visits to Nuon Chea aka Brother Number Two (second-in-command of the Khmer Rouge) whom he must coax into confessing the atrocities his party committed. The secretive Nuon Chea is not the only one hiding something though, as Sambeth too holds back the tragic details of his stunted family tree.

As they share both stories and meals, Sambeth builds an unsettlingly paternal relationship with his father’s killer. But in a culture where even strangers are called ‘uncle’ or ‘auntie’, he does not forget that blood runs thicker than water.

Enemies of the People is about breaking the stoical silence of a killer.  The film grieves for what happens when communist ideologies are passed from political abstraction into farm hands.

Sambeth describes his search for any one of these thousands of foot-soldiers: ‘like looking for a needle in the sea.’ But the advantage Sambeth has over other journalists is that, to these men riddled with guilt, he is a native; a brother of the earth.

Already having won over a dozen international prizes this year, Enemies of the People gets so close that it is able to capture both the throat-slitting techniques of a murderer, as well as the tear in his eye. In every sense of the phrase, Enemies of the People will be one for the history books.