‘Pol Pot Dancing’: Cambodia’s Dictator Tried To Wipe Out Classical Dance, But His Foster Mom Saved It – Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival
deadline.comIn one of the most compelling films to hold its world premiere at the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival, archive footage shows an apparently amiable man dressed in black sitting for an interview with a Yugoslav journalist.
The year is approximately 1977. “Comrade, you are the first person to hear my biography,” the man says with a warm laugh. The man is Pol Pot, the Cambodian dictator then in the middle of his four-year genocidal reign of terror atop his country, a period in which a quarter of the Cambodia’s population perished.
Director Enrique Sánchez Lansch tracked down the incredibly rare interview in the archives of Serbian TV. Pol Pot almost never spoke to journalists, and rarely, if ever, told the truth about his background.
In the 1977 conversation, he paints a humble picture of his childhood – saying he grew up the son of a “peasant farmer.” That was a self-serving fiction with only a semblance of reality.
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