Our fifth film club meeting!

We watched the movie "First They Killed My Father" on March 21, 2023. This is a film about the Khmer Rouge rule in Cambodia.

When we watched this movie, we felt that the movie was slow-paced, like a documentary, and not tightly plotted. The movie gives me the feeling that it shows the real life of the little girl, such as moving from the city to the countryside, watching her family leave her one by one, and being brainwashed by the Khmer Rouge step by step, until she becomes a soldier. While I was watching the movie, I felt that the most desperate thing was that the Cambodian people were forced to pass through a land full of landmines in order to escape from the soldiers, but after watching the movie, I realized that the most desperate thing was that the little girl fell into the control of the Khmer Rouge step by step and was brainwashed and used by them. She has no way to change what is happening around her, no way to save her persecuted relatives, and no way to protect herself. Many Cambodians, like this little girl, have not given up their resistance and have not forgotten their history, which has made Cambodia what it is now.

I went to Cambodia once in February 2019, where I felt that it was still very hot even in winter, and my friend and I didn't want to get out of the car to visit the open-air sites because we couldn't stand the heat. We visited the Cambodian temples and Angkor where the monks are highly respected, as I can't imagine that they were abused and punished during the Khmer Rouge rule not so long ago. We also visited the prison where the Khmer Rouge once held and massacred the Cambodian people, which was then turned into a museum. I saw countless human remains in the museum and countless instruments of torture used by the Khmer Rouge to abuse others. Not only did I see the barbed wire on the windows, but I also saw buildings like the one in the movie. The film was very realistic and almost exactly like Cambodia I remembered. I couldn't imagine what the Cambodian people had gone through, and everything in the museum was still the mark of the people who had been there. I remembered the long corridors and dilapidated rooms, all evidence of the oppression of the Cambodian people. Even the little girl in the movie lived in the countryside, where the conditions were even more difficult and there were landmines all around.

But I also saw something else in the museum that impressed me, a notebook for visitors to write down their impressions of their visit. There were many different languages in the notebook, but all of them expressed the same idea. In that museum, visitors had witnessed too much of the painful past of the Cambodian people, but now they were left with more hope and courage. Hopefully, something like the Khmer Rouge will not happen again in Cambodia or worldwide.

By the way, the last picture is one of the pictures I took in 2019 when I when to Cambodia.