Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia (1979) Poster

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9/10
John Pilger Never Lets Up
view_and_review20 February 2022
John Pilger is now my favorite documentarian. Werner Hertzog is good, Michael Moore has some great stuff, and Alex Gibney was my guy until I discovered John Pilger. He will never let you rest, he will never let you claim ignorance, he will never let you down. His documentaries bring human suffering at the hands of other humans right into your face.

In "Year Zero" he is showing the world the soul crushing sadness that is Cambodia in 1979. After the U. S. carpet bombed Cambodia in a secret mission meant to break the backs of the Vietnamese, it made way for the Khmer Rouge to come through and finish destroying whatever was still standing.

The Kmer Rouge are a most mercurial and dangerously strange bunch. They are enemies of progress and development. I've heard of war mongers killing and destroying due to race, ethnicity, religion, and even class, but never due to progress and development. The Kmer Rouge hate and oppose anything that resembles modern civilization. They destroyed and disavowed money, hospitals, schools, libraries, churches, and temples, while they killed doctors, nurses, teachers, architects, and anyone else who had a skill they had to go to school for. It is a very bizarre position that proved deadly to Cambodians. The result was a death toll in the hundreds of thousands, if not the millions. And those were the lucky ones. Those who remained of the hapless men, women, and children were weak, emaciated, and sickly due to the extreme lack of food and medicine.

John Pilger goes to Cambodia to bring proof to the world of Cambodia's suffering while also exposing and shaming the U. S. and British governments as only he can.
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Very powerful early documentary
alainenglish6 May 2007
Warning: Spoilers
In one of his earlier documentaries, renowned journalist John Pilger looked at the ravaging effect of the Indonesian Khmer Rouge armies invasion of Cambodia, their overthrow by the neighbouring Vietnamese and the inaction of Western governments to help rebuild the country and restore it to democracy.

Pilger focuses a lot on the poverty rampant in Cambodia and the sights of flea-ridden children and adults may be a bit much for some. Pilger also interviews two former Khmer Rouge soldiers and shames and humiliates them for their actions, including mass murder and torture, right in front of the camera. He occasionally over-eggs the documentary with examples of this and some of his footage can be seen to be a little emotionally manipulative and sensationalistic, a charge he has always had to face in his work. Another example of this is when Pilger interviews survivors of the Khmer Rouge regime including some Westerners who have attempted to help the situation.

This is a very good example of Pilger's emotive, provocative style of documentary film-making. His anger at the situation, particularly in his narration and to-camera monologues, is very, very palpable. He is well aware of the political realities that have led to the situation and ends the documentary on a note that very little has been done to help in spite of the attention he and others have drawn to the country's plight.

Now released on DVD, this documentary by a flawed but brilliant journalist is well worth a look today.
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