"What I Did Was Criminal... but Serving an Ideology. "
Duch is a soft-spoken, frail, Cambodian man. He has a bad left hand; he's missing a finger, and he has a deep, long scar to suggest that his finger didn't leave his hand without extraordinary amounts of pain. He lives most of his days in a small room with nothing but a bed and a desk, where he pours over his Bible. He will talk to almost anyone who will listen - he seems afraid to ask for forgiveness, although that's what he wants. Duch won't ask for forgiveness, but he will tell his story and hope that the listener will turn their mercy upon him.
Most documentaries today serve one of two purposes: to entertain or to persuade. Morgan Spurlock's adventures into male facial hair, Comic-Con, or product-placement, may have some educational and informative value, but their primary purpose is to engage the audience and to entertain. Other documentaries, like Food Inc or Countdown to Zero, were created to offer a perspective on an issue. While these movies can be...
The murdering bureaucrat that talks too much
Many venues have described and documented the actions of the Khmer Rouge after they took power in Cambodia in 1975. Following deliberate policies of extermination, approximately one-quarter of the population was liquidated, with a concentration on the educated and successful. Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch, was the director of the M13 and S21 facilities, where tens of thousands of people were tortured and executed. This movie is an extensive interview with Duch after he was found guilty of his crimes and sentenced to life in prison.
The most chilling aspects of this movie are the matter of fact ways Duch describes his actions and how the Khmer Rouge operated. He is the poster child for the mindless bureaucrat, doing his job according to the rules with no regard for the consequences of the action. Duch expresses very little in the way of remorse, he looks proudly at the documents in front of him that he has annotated and corrected, he could have been a supervisor in a county...
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